5 Reasons Cloud-Based DRaaS is Your Best Choice for Backup and Disaster Recovery

Your business is under attack. But, of course, you already knew that. The numbers don’t lie: According to the Cyberthreat Defense Report, 81 percent of respondents said their networks were breached last year. Even worse, a record 62 percent were compromised by ransomware. And most paid the ransom! But that’s just the human side of potential threats. Last year set a record for hurricanes in the U.S., with 30 named storms during the Atlantic hurricane season causing an estimated $60 billion in damages. While individuals may have borne the brunt of those costs, thousands of businesses were also hurt or destroyed.

Regardless of what malicious humans or Mother Nature throws at your business, you need to be able to keep things running or face serious consequences. That’s where Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) comes into play. DRaaS is a third-party service that replicates the systems, data, and applications from your on-premises network to other devices or clouds so they can be recovered and restored.

Here are a few good reasons you should specifically consider cloud-based DRaasS for your business.  

1. Less Complexity

Maintaining your infrastructure—keeping everything patched and running smoothly—is already hard enough. Add in all of the details behind backup and disaster recovery (BDR)—target machines, backup regimens, scheduling, and more—and things get even more complicated. BDR cloud services make everything simpler. And offloading your BDR to a DRaaS provider everything gets simpler still. Solutions like StorageCraft Cloud Services let you centrally manage your cloud backups via an easy-to-use, self-service online portal. And you can easily configure the recovery sequence, order, and timing for each of your mission-critical systems. Simple.

2. Lower Costs

Building your own offsite BDR solution often doesn’t make economic sense. Consider the expense of leasing space for a secondary data center alone. Then there are the ongoing costs of power, cooling, and connectivity. And that doesn’t include buying servers, storage, and network equipment for your secondary site. With DRaaS, all of that goes away. And you’ll never face a forklift upgrade for your BDR systems again.

3. Unmatched Scalability

We’ve all seen the data points about the exponential growth of data being generated. That’s one side effect of digital transformation. If you’ve built a secondary site for your backups, you’re likely to need to keep adding storage over time to keep up. With DRaaS, you have virtually unlimited scalability in the cloud at your fingertips.

4. Faster Failover

DRaaS services also offer advanced networking features that let you run your network in the cloud—exactly as you’d run it onsite. StorageCraft Cloud Services even features the patented ability to pre-stage site-wide failover processes so you can test or execute a failover process by clicking a single button.

5. Total Business Continuity

The best DRaaS solutions ensure that your on-premises business systems and data are always protected in a cloud purpose-built for business continuity. They also let you recover everything from files and folders to your entire site and network without missing a beat. Take a look at the first paragraph of this post again. Then compare those costs and consequences to the cost of putting a DRaaS solution in place. For many businesses, DRaaS is the obvious answer.

Summary

Want to take a deep dive into DRaaS? Check out our series of posts on the subject—you’ll find the first one here—or talk to a StorageCraft engineer about the difference DRaaS can make for your business.