Why is DRaaS useful?

Millions of businesses around the world encounter some form of natural disaster. Imagine if a power outage, hardware failure, file corruption, human error, earthquake, flood, hurricane, thunderstorm, wildfire, winter weather, or tornado, strikes your data center. Major interruptions like your website going down or losing all your customer data will likely occur.

What should you consider when choosing a DRaaS?

1. Get a performance service level agreement (SLA) - Create a contract between you and your service provider to ensure pre-defined performance (i.e. 1 hour SLA guaranteeing your critical applications will be up and running within an hour).
2. DRaaS costs are highly variable - Watch out for hidden fees (i.e. retrieval fees that charge per gigabyte which can substantially add up).
3. Couple DRaaS with data protection - The cloud is an ideal place for long-term data retention because it’s isolated from production data and remote from ransomware.
4. Pay for only what you use - Choose a provider that offers different DRaaS services for different classes of applications.
5. Cloud seeding options - With cloud seeding, you can use physical media (i.e. tape, server, hard disks, etc.) to pre-load your data to the cloud and restore a failed local database.
6. DRaaS can protect cloud applications - Deploy a backup appliance within the cloud and point your cloud applications to backup software in a different cloud facility than where your cloud applications are running.
7. Include automated test recovery - You should have automated testing at least once a month and after any changes to the infrastructure to ensure your applications will really recovery.
8. Advantages of purpose-built clouds - Purpose-built clouds have seamless integration between your backup appliances and the cloud, holistic support, and predictable recovery times.