What Is Disaster Recovery as a Service?

A business’ most valuable asset is data. Any incremental loss impacts your company, but if your data is wiped out due to a natural or human-made disaster, the damage can be irreparable. Discover how you can leverage cloud disaster recovery services to protect your most critical assets.

Disaster recovery is a plan set in place by an organization for recovering their critical data and IT infrastructure after unexpected events. There are various disaster recovery methods a company can choose to implement to support business continuity. Traditionally, disaster recovery involved organizations replicating data and computer processing to store in an off-site location that could be accessed if the primary location was compromised. Today, businesses have the option of migrating their IT infrastructure to the cloud.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) allows organizations to back up data and migrate their IT infrastructure into the cloud via a third-party provider. DRaaS is offered on a pay-as-you-go basis, helping you save on capital expenditures. Any changes to your data are automatically backed up and can be accessed virtually anywhere, at any time without effort from your internal IT team. This allows your business to stay up and running, even after an emergency.

DRaaS works by replicating and storing an organizations’ IT infrastructure in the cloud and at a third-party vendors’ secure facilities. Instead of maintaining your own off-site disaster recovery environment, your data is stored and managed by your DRaaS provider. Authorized users can access data anytime, anywhere for quick recovery and minimal downtime.

In a traditional disaster recovery plan, businesses need to invest upfront in building and maintaining a secondary off-site data center to store copies of critical data. Data backups are then performed manually and delivered to the off-site location. This is time-consuming and demanding for internal IT teams.

DRaaS automates cloud backups, requiring minimal input from an organization. The cloud platform is typically built within data centers offering enterprise-level infrastructure and security. Everything is done using a pay-as-you-go model with a third-party provider, so internal IT teams can prioritize business tasks. If a disaster or unexpected event occurs, authorized users are easily able to access critical business data from virtually anywhere and on any device.

While both DRaaS and BaaS support an organizations’ business continuity strategy, they serve different purposes. With DRaaS, a third-party cloud provider migrates your organizations’ computer processing into the cloud, so you can still access your critical applications and continue to operate from virtually anywhere even if your IT infrastructure is destroyed.

BaaS only protects your data and not your computer processing. BaaS is a good option for businesses that need to archive data for legal reasons. Ideally, organizations should combine both services to ensure business continuity.

DRaaS stores your most critical applications and data in a cloud platform with enterprise-level infrastructure and security.

DRaaS helps reduce capital expenses by allowing you to pay only for what you need. Moreover, you don’t have to spend on the labor needed to maintain your own disaster recovery site. 

Conveniently scale your cloud computing resources depending on your current business needs.

A critical part of having a strong disaster recovery strategy is ensuring it works. With DRaaS, your provider is responsible for testing to make sure your infrastructure is recoverable within the required timeframe promised in the service-level agreement.

DRaaS helps protect your infrastructure, configurations and critical functions so your business continues producing after an unexpected event with minimal downtime.

If you’re looking to improve your business continuity plan and disaster recovery strategy, consider migrating to the cloud. Providers like Cox Business offer a suite of cloud solutions to help protect your business against natural disasters, human error, cyber-attacks and power outages. Keep your organization up and running with DRaaS.