DRaaS: A service that Assures Data Recovery for all Organizations in Times of Disaster

Every mechanism present on this planet has a recovery plan, for instance, information regarding natural catastrophe like cyclones are notified in advance for evacuating people in the area. Just like that, all the industries and leading businesses also have a recovery plan in action as soon as the disaster strikes. All the established business makes use of disaster recovery as a service for ensuring continuity of the company. Disaster recovery as a service plays a vital role in sustaining huge companies, manufacturing units, industries, and SMEs in times of an untimed disaster.

What is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)?

DRaaS utilizes cloud computing applications to protect data from disruptions that are mainly caused by disasters such as power outage or a natural calamity. DRaaS has the ability to back up the entire system and replicate data for harboring business continuity.

Apart from this, DRaaS permits applications to run on virtual machines (VM) in the absence of disaster and proves to be a useful tool for those companies that lack a potential disaster recovery plan. Furthermore, DRaaS carries out hosting and replication of virtual or physical servers by providing failover during disasters. DRaaS is also known as BCaaS (Business Continuity as a Service) and some of the prominent examples of it are AWS (Amazon Web Services), Acronics, C&W Business, and Bios Middle East.

How has Covid-19 Pandemic Affected the Disaster Recovery as a Service Market?

As the entire globe is fighting to survive and overcome the coronavirus pandemic, the disaster recovery as a service market is estimated to surge tremendously in 2020. According to a report published by Research Dive, the disaster recovery as a service market is predicted to boost with a CAGR of 42.9% in 2029-2026 forecasted period.

Lockdown pushed all the organizations to work from home and DRaaS is a handy tool for assuring remote working conditions. Moreover, cloud services offer flexibility, automation, and cost effectiveness. The Research Dive report predicts that artificial intelligence along with automation will create lucrative opportunities for this market. 

Why DRaaS is preferred by Businesses?

DRaaS services depend on customer requirements as there is no need for the entire data to backup; this factor assures flexible data protection and cost reduction of the services. DRaaS solely depends on cloud computing that can replicate resources to various sites; thus ascertaining continuous data backup if anyone of the site is unavailable.

Moreover, DRaaS does not favour any single vendor or services and ends up replicating everything in the path. The ability of disaster recovery as a service to duplicate data automatically relieves the in-house IT staff and shifts their focus on other important projects. Beyond this, disaster recovery eliminates the need to establish secondary data center and like-for-like copy of hardware between the primary data center and disaster recovery place.

A statement published on forbes.com said that according to a report by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) 43% business affected by disaster never open and 29% close in 2 years. Therefore, data recovery during disaster is essential for big and small organizations. Apart from this, data retrieval time of DRaaS is around 4 hours.  

Safety Tips before Buying DRaaS

1. Make a contract between the service provider and you for a pre-defined performance. This agreement is termed as service level agreement (SLA).  

2. Install cloud for long term data storage facility, protection from viruses, and isolation for data generation.

3. Calculate fees carefully as sometimes retrieval fees are added that are charged per gigabyte.

4. DRaaS offers variety of applications; therefore pay only for what you are going to use in the future.

5. Install a backup application in the cloud services for backing up software to a place where all cloud applications are running.

6. Make sure that you have cloud seeding as this use physical media such as hard disks, servers, pen drives, and tapes for pre-loading data on cloud and fixing failed local database.

7. Prefer a purpose-built cloud that integrates backup application, holistic support, cloud itself, and predictable recovery.

8. Automated testing recovery factor ensures that all the applications are running smoothly.

What are the Limitations of DRaaS?

Like any other service, disaster recovery as a service too has its own disadvantages that should be known before using it. These are as follows: 

• Trust issues with the service providers by the businesses for incorporating plans in the event of a disaster and meet recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) as defined by DRaaS. 

• The customer has to depend on a service provider's security if a failover occurs.

• There can be performance problems with the applications running in the cloud services.

• There could be bandwidth challenges, especially with continuous data duplication.

Future Scenario for DRaaS

DRaaS is a never-ending service that will continue till some new and innovative technology takes its place in the future. For now, DRaaS is a useful tool for businesses as it ensures data backup within minutes. DRaaS is expected to grow significantly in the Covid-19 situation and after the pandemic as well.

About the Author(s)

Princy A. J

Princy holds a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the prestigious Tamil Nadu Dr. M.G.R. University at Chennai, India. After a successful academic record, she pursued her passion for writing. A thorough professional and enthusiastic writer, she enjoys writing on various categories and advancements in the global industries. She plays an instrumental role in writing about current updates, news, blogs, and trends.