What is Disaster Recovery?

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Disaster recovery (DR) is an important area for many businesses, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic. It is focused on recovery planning/business continuity planning so a business can recover as quickly as possible from IT disasters. These can include human disasters as well as natural disasters.

Having a disaster recovery solution means companies are able to maintain or quickly resume mission-critical business should anything stop the normal business operations. The recovery strategy can often include things like data loss, hardware and software, network equipment, data center connections, power, and connecting to the internet.

When we use the word disaster that can cover a wide range of things but in short is anything that disrupts the business operating as normal. Come of the most common causes of needing a DR plan include:

• Fire
• Floods
• Theft
• Cyber attacks
• Hackers
• Connectivity failures
• Hardware failures
• Software failures
• A global pandemic!
• Datacenter dropouts
• Storms
• Human/staff error
• Building work where wires get damaged

In the event of a disaster striking without a disaster recovery plan any one of the above can have a huge negative impact on a business losing revenue until services are resumed, which is why it’s important to have a DR plan or DRaaS in place.

Disaster Recovery As a Service (DRaaS)

If you look into DR you are likely to find companies that talk about DRaaS which stands for disaster recovery as a service. DRaaS is a cloud-based solution for DR allowing you to pick a provider to backup all your systems, data, and applications onto their cloud services /data center. This means the DR site where a disaster has struck can be fixed while business continues as normal.

It mirrors your companies current infrastructure on virtual servers using virtual machines so you can continue business as normal without the need of your physical servers that have been impacted by a disaster. This means recovery time can be as little as minutes rather than days or hours – saving you on the time of lost revenue/customers. Which is why DRaaS solutions are growing in popularity among businesses of all sizes.

Disaster recovery as a service advantages

Time saved

The advantages of DRaaS vary depending on your business. For larger companies with a dedicated IT team, time management is a key advantage. Their IT experts will usually have too busy a work schedule to be able to adequately research, test, and implement DR plans. Because you are leaving all that to the provider with DRaaS you eliminate the need to plan and leave it in the hands of experts instead.

Money Saved

All businesses can usually see the advantage of DRaaS when looking at it from a cost perspective. DRaaS can be much cheaper than hosting your own backup in a separate location with the staff needed to successfully maintain too, especially if disaster never strikes. Most businesses would need to hire excess IT staff to manage a full DRaaS, whereas by using a provider you pay a much smaller amount. There are also DRaaS providers who don’t charge unless you need to use them.

Peace of mind 

One of the key advantages of DRaaS is the peace of mind you will get. If you are a small business the expense of hiring IT teams, finding a data center, and maintaining the DR plan can be extremely costly and take a lot of time. Cloud computing is not new and many of us use it daily in our business operations. DRaaS offerings allow us to take advantage of the same principles & use to recover from any situation that could result in a loss of business.

DRaaS vs BaaS

Many business owners will find it easy to confuse Disaster Recovery as a Service & Back up as a service. IT plays a huge part in most modern businesses and both have a place, but also have some very key differences. BaaS is typically a low cost “bare bones” solution that allows you to store your data in the cloud offsite & have it protected but unlike DRaaS doesn’t protect your infrastructure or systems and allow them to keep being used.

This means that if you do have to recover your IT team would need to rebuild your infrastructure to start working again. This can take time depending on the use of systems and what you rely on, can cost you a lot in lost revenue too. While they do that you will have limited access to your business applications.

DRaas replicates your entire service including all the applications. This means that should anything go wrong you are able to almost instantly regain access to your business applications & continue to work as normal while you recover your own systems.

The business world is using cloud applications at a higher rate than ever, so it makes sense that recovering from any loss or potential loss of business would involve the cloud too. To find the best deal on DRaaS have a chat with one of our experts today by filling in the above form.