Data centers are generally secure, but floods, fires, and physical intruders are possibilities that could destroy a network environment. Every organization—including data centers—needs a disaster recovery plan to ensure business continuity in the event of an unforeseen downtime incident.
What Is Disaster Recovery?
Traditionally, organizations would create backups on their network or move backups to the cloud. Backups aren’t the only component in disaster recovery, but they are a main remediation tool after a data breach or physical damage from an incident. While on-site backups are useful, natural disasters or physical theft render them ineffective if the backup storage system is located on premises.
Cloud backups were introduced as a way to store data during disaster recovery exercises, but data backups don’t address any infrastructure. Backups are beneficial for data protection and recovery, but they do not address loss in infrastructure, productivity, and downed internet connections. A disaster recovery plan involves more than backups. It covers the steps toward containment and eradication of a compromise, investigations into infrastructure interruptions after an incident, failover procedures, and notifications for everyone involved in executing the disaster recovery plan.
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is meant to alleviate the overhead and infrastructure costs of a traditional disaster recovery plan. Instead of hosting expensive hardware and software on premises, businesses can move their failover infrastructure to the cloud. Because it runs in the cloud, the disaster recovery plan executes as a cloud service, which gives DRaaS its name.
What Is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)?
Housing internal disaster recovery infrastructure is expensive and requires staff to support it. Disaster recovery as a service (DSaaS) houses infrastructure in the cloud. It can facilitate a smoother transition from internal disaster recovery workflows to cloud-based storage and failover. Instead of hosting failover infrastructure, the data center can host it on a third-party cloud hosting service. In the event of a disaster, administrators can switch over to cloud resources to continue business productivity until local downtime issues are resolved.
Cloud computing technology is widely used in DRaaS using infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and virtualization. Using cloud computing lowers costs and offers scalability as the business grows and needs more virtual resources. While backup as a service (BaaS) infrastructure is included in DRaaS, it’s only one component and not a full DRaaS solution.
With DRaaS, large organizations and data centers have a fast way to offer failover for their customers. Downtime can cost millions of dollars per hour for large enterprises, so DRaaS could help data centers avoid costly litigation and loss of customer trust. Some customers require DRaaS before doing business with a data center.
How Much Does Disaster Recovery as a Service Cost?
DRaaS can cost up to six figures a year or a few thousand dollars a month. Because of the high cost, it’s usually reserved for large organizations. The cost depends on the services and infrastructure deployed as failover. As more infrastructure and servers are added, costs increase. Backups likely become larger and larger as the business grows, so storage costs for DRaaS also increase.
Two factors go into determining DRaaS resources: recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).
