A Deep Dive into DRaaS: Everything You Should Know About the Components of Backup and Disaster Recovery – 4-Part Series

This is the first of four posts where we will take a close look into the elements that have put DRaaS solutions at the top of most businesses’ lists for data protection.  

While the stakes may be higher if you’re a global enterprise, every business gets hurt when downtime strikes. At the top end, an IDC study found that infrastructure failures cost Fortune 1000 companies $100,000 per hour, while unplanned application downtime costs averaged $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion.  But even small and medium businesses take a big hit when their systems go down. An ITIC study found that nearly half of SMBs estimate that a single hour of downtime easily costs $100,000 or more in lost revenue, end-user productivity, and IT staff time.

That’s why disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is being adopted by more and more businesses of every size and stripe. One study shows that DRaaS is currently in use by 45 percent of businesses globally, and another 34 percent expect to migrate to DRaaS in 2021. With so many companies making the move to DRaaS we thought it would be helpful to take a look at the functionalities and features that make it so attractive.

DRaaS Defined

Gartner defines DRaaS as a productized service where the provider manages server image and production data replication to the cloud, disaster recovery run book creation (recovery groups that are combined into a single entity), automated server recovery within the cloud, automated server failback from the cloud, and network element and functionality configuration, as needed. While that is the complete definition, put simply, DRaaS is a third-party service that replicates your systems, data, and applications from your on-premises network to other devices, or clouds, so they can be recovered and restored.

The Business Case for DRaaS

Whether it’s a natural disaster like a hurricane or a flood, a regional power outage, or even ransomware, a quick glance at the first paragraph should be enough to convince you that the business case is already made. With DRaaS ensuring business continuity, no matter what happens, recovery from a sitewide disaster is fast and easy from a disaster recovery cloud. Add up the cost to your business in dollars and cents: lost data, lost productivity, and damage to your reputation. Just an hour of downtime could pay for a year—or many years, for that matter—of DRaaS.

From a business perspective, all that matters about DRaaS is that it can slash downtime to keep your business humming along. But from a technical perspective, it’s worth looking at the superset for each DRaaS component listed by Gartner and what that means for your business.

In our next post, we’ll dive into replication and how it maximizes data protection. In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about StorageCraft Cloud Services DRaaS solution, talk to a StorageCraft engineer.