Understanding Disaster Recovery-As-A-Service

Prepare for Anything with DRaaS for Your IT Disaster Recovery Solution

According to Forbes, business owners aren’t dedicating enough time towards disaster recovery preparedness. A disaster recovery plan requires businesses to identify vulnerable aspects of their business. However, you must take this information to the next step and apply what you know to protect your business. Forbes Insights and IBM conducted a survey that states 78 percent of executives expect their disaster recovery plan to automatically kick into high gear following a disaster. But will it?

The problem that the industry faces is that these same business are typically not actually prepared to keep their data and business afloat after a disaster. An IT disaster management plan requires just that: management, which a disaster recovery solution provider can provide. The key to revolutionizing your disaster recovery plan should probably involve disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) – eliminating the dependency of the business to provide the specialized services and skills needed at a time of crisis.

What is DRaaS?

DRaaS is a computer services fail-safe solution that protects against interruptions to information technology associated with a disaster. When you have a DRaaS solution in place, a third-party service provider manages the backup of your data to protect against loss. This also ensures that you will be able to promptly recover your data and critical systems using the backup – regardless if it is on premises or elsewhere.

What are the Types of Disaster Recovery Plans?

There are just as many types of disaster recovery plans as there are potential threats to your business. For example, you may use a backup-only DRaaS that provides you with an offsite, cloud-based backup of your data after a disaster. Other types of DRaaS that might be beneficial include:

What is Backup as a Service?

By choosing backup as a service, a third-party vendor handles all of your backup needs. This includes selecting the right storage solution and offsite locations for your data storage. In the event that your business is hit with an event that impacts your data processing capability or the availability of your IT systems, you have the resources offsite to keep your business running. This allows you to follow suit with your data continuity plan and your business continuity plan, for a seamlessly run operation in any situation. To get started, choose a third-party vendor to support your managed IT services.

Advantages of DRaaS

A DRaaS solution offers a number of advantages. For starters, disaster recovery as a service allows you to have backups on multiple sites offsite from your location. This ensures that you can stay operational no matter what happens to your own physical site, or if even one other site is down. DRaaS is also open to more than one operational platform and vendor. You are not tied down to a single environment when you implement a DRaaS offering.

How DRaaS Works: Components and Process

When you are using DRaaS, you need to be able to manage potential data breaches with a variety of processes. Start with replication, failover, and failback—three of the processes involved in a DRaaS.

Replication

Replicating data involves backing up your data into an archive. This data is documented, and information is accessible in real-time. In order to perform replication, the system you use to back up your servers and data has access to all of your systems and applications. In the event of a disaster, there are multiple sites where the data is replicated in real-time, and this can be used to patch the backup in case of a failure at one site.

Failover

Failover and recovery of data after a disaster involves actively protecting your computer systems against failure. Standby equipment and backup data are utilized to ensure that data continuity is achieved if the main system goes down or is attacked. DRaaS allows you to handle failover with the least amount of time and expense. Everything is managed in the cloud and off-site, which minimizes your cost onsite with equipment and staffing.

You are able to test and run services that you need when you need them, saving your company money that could be spent on bloated software solutions. Furthermore, you can use a diverse number of DRaaS solutions within the cloud from a variety of software vendors. This gives your business the most significant prospect for scaling up your IT services as needed.

Failback

Following failover, you need failback to come back on board and handle the restoration of your servers or IT systems after a disaster. In the event of a failover that forces your processes to run using the backup data, failback covers the data that is now taken in this time period. Data copying, mirroring, and replication is affected until this data can be resynchronized and returned to the original data storage system.

Get Up and Running Through Virtualization

Disaster recovery as a service using virtualization, or virtual DRaaS, allows you to use cloud solutions for your data backup and recovery. One example of a virtual DRaaS that provides a data security service is IDS DataGuard™ offered by IDS Systems.

Comprehensive Data Security Solution

IDS DataGuard™ by IDS Systems is one of the most dedicated data security solutions on the market. Using IDS DataGuard™, you are able to use a hybrid cloud solution that is effective in most environments. This hybrid cloud solution allows you to amend your DRaaS as needed to best protect your data in the instance of a disaster. By using offsite data storage centers, you can rest assured that your disaster recovery and data continuity plans can be met.

Contact IDS Systems for more information on how to get started with IDS DataGuard™ for your company. The solution scales from small SMB environments to enterprise calibre data centres. We are ready to work for your company as your preferred disaster recovery solution provider.

At IDS Systems, we offer comprehensive and fully managed IT services for businesses of all sizes across all industries. Let us provide you with a quote on services for your IT solutions today.