Understanding Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

Disaster recovery (DR) planning by design is a time-consuming, laborious process. It’s also exceedingly difficult. Disaster Recovery as a Service, or DRaaS, is effectively an outsourced solution provided by a trusted service provider.

The responsibility for every nuance of the recovery system is taken on by that service provider. They ensure every system, file, database and network element has a sufficient backup and restore point. For the organisation, it means they deal with a face rather than an interface and can benefit from external expertise.

DRaaS enables organisations for whom internal disaster recovery planning is too complex to benefit from it, without investing their own manpower. In fact, organisations are always surprised by how little they need to know about DR to get started. DRaaS makes DR possible and it tends to be an organisation’s first successful DR effort.

This is an innovative solution because it represents a less costly way to back up critical data and quickly recover from disaster. The bottom line is the low cost and simplicity of DRaaS makes DR available to an entirely new class of organisation.

The way this is achieved can be described somewhat simply: cloud-based resources are leveraged to provide available and reliable infrastructure to store data and information. The back-ups are automatic, and the recovery can be instantaneous. This cloud-based infrastructure is far less expensive than a comparable on-premises system, and it doesn’t require any of the maintenance on on-premises system does. The result is a low maintenance and simplified system for complete disaster recovery. The above can apply to public cloud, private cloud and managed cloud to suit the organisation.

There’s much more to DRaaS than our description covers, but you get the idea. You can imagine DRaaS as an outsourced disaster recovery solution, provided by a trusted service provider who’ll design and implement everything for you. Some organisations play a role in the planning, but the service itself is delivered externally.