What is DRaaS

Definition of Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS)

DRaaS stands for Disaster Recovery as a Service which is a cloud-based service provided by third-party vendors such as IBM, Seagate, and Microsoft. It involves taking proactive measures for safeguarding data by having a backup operational mode that replicates or hosts physical or virtual servers.

Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service is a neonatal infant in the world of ‘as-a-service models'. It is the process of replicating and hosting of physical and virtual servers present in a distant location or an alternative appliance or a cloud. When there is an occurrence of any man-made or natural disaster, the data from these replicated systems can be accessed instantly.

The preparation of a disaster recovery plan involves the development of comprehensive strategies that encircle company's hardware, software, and networking equipment. These strategies should ensure rapid recovery as companies minimizing downtime is crucial for business today. Using DRaaS helps organizations reduce costs as there is no requirement for an off-site or on-site disaster recovery infrastructure.

White Paper: Disaster Recovery for HPC BioInformatics Environment

How is Disaster Recovery different from Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS)?

Disaster Recovery and business continuity have become a taunting issue for any organization. With the rise in the number of threats, attacks, and competitive business, it is important to have a recovery plan to withstand a disaster. A serious failure in technology can have a great impact on an organization's business due to increased use of technology.

Disaster Recovery is a process of developing and implementing plans to ensure business continuity in any organization. Disasters can be caused due to various reasons, ranging from man-made disasters to natural disasters, leading to a certain period of business discontinuity.

Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service uses cloud computing, cloud resources, and backup service to protect applications and data from disruptions caused by natural phenomena or intentional man-made disaster. It gives a total system backup of an organization's data that allows business continuity, in case of any system failure. DRaaS is also called as Business Continuity as a Service (BCaaS) as it ensures business continuity by minimizing downtime and disruption to customers, clients, and employees in the event of server failure or disaster.

White Paper: Disaster Recovery Guide: DR in Virtualized Environments​

DRaaS offers many advantages over traditional backup and Disaster Recovery methods:

• Reduces time—Use of DRaaS reduces the time consumed when returning applications to production without having to worry about restoring the data over the internet.
   
• Cloud-based DRaaS have gained wide adoption mainly the small and medium-sized businesses have benefitted from DRaaS in their infrastructure without having to invest hugely in testing a Disaster Recovery plan or maintaining their own off-site DR environment.
   
• An only required amount of data can be backed up depending on the customer's requirement to reduce cost with flexible protection.
   
• As the resources are replicated to multiple sites to ensure continuous backup and availability of data when a site experiences downtime issues.
   
• DRaaS is also available to organizations that use on-premise solutions, which enables them a sandbox to test cloud computing.
   
• DRaaS in the cloud reduces the hardware requirements for on-premise, while traditional backup service needs expensive on-premise hardware requirements that are very complex to implement or manage.
   
• DRaaS replicates in any environment without having to worry about the type of platform or vendor.
   
• Cloud DRaaS enables full replication and backup of data and applications while serving as a secondary infrastructure. This becomes a new environment for organizations allowing users to continue with daily business operations when the primary source is in repair.
   
• It is reliable and helps to address many challenges including mobility, portability, and high performance.
   
• Implementing DRaaS requires very fewer resources and results in significant savings in software licenses and hardware, allowing companies to invest more in other areas of operation like marketing and R&D.