Top 4 Considerations When Choosing Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

Thinking about the possibility of a disaster is obviously not picked by everyone. It’s much easier to think that it is never going to happen to me in business. However, when disaster does strike, this false sense of security often results in organizations and people finding themselves miserable. At a certain point between human error, equipment failure, natural calamities, and cyber-attacks, you will surely experience a disaster through the life of your business. The potential loss of customers, their trust, and data has put many businesses under loss.

Some of the eye-opening and alarming facts are as follows:

• As per the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), around 40-60% of small businesses never revive following a disaster.
• According to a survey, about 75% of small businesses are not ready with a disaster plan.
• According to a Nationwide Insurance survey, the owners of around 50% of small business say that recovering from a disaster takes at least three months or more.

Thankfully, with the rapid adoption of cloud, these statistics can soon be a part of the past. As per Research Dive analyst review,  cloud has become its own comforting prospect to any calamity by familiarizing the world with Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). The best DRaaS providers give you an immediate access and keep your data secure in the aftermath of a disaster. Hence, there is no need to maintain the infrastructure of storage.

However, the following four factors should be considered before choosing a right DRaaS provider in order to make sure you made the right choice for your entity or business.

1.    Understanding and Support

Before moving on to other considerations, it’s important that your provider understands your processes and business needs. Just make sure your DRaaS provider is able to remediate any issues that can hamper alignment with their own architecture. Considering support is the second most important thing as some providers leave you and set you up on your own. For larger organizations, this may be acceptable as they already have a full-time IT staff. But smaller organizations can be benefitted more from the provider owing to the technical assistance they provide when necessary.

2.    Recovery Speeds

How quickly your DRaaS provider can get you back in business can be determined by the following:

• RTO (Recovery Time Objective): It is the passage of time before affecting the Business Community Plan (BCP) during a disaster. 
• RPO (Recovery Point Objective): It is the expanse of time to avoid business continuity breaks or negative consequences for a business function to be restored. 

Thus, to keep your business close to a zero RTO and RPO, you’ll have to find a DRaaS provider that delivers quick recovery speeds, and also follows a CPD model (Continuous Data Protection).

3.    Compliance

When considering DRaaS providers and cloud backup, it is crucial to make sure that they meet the needed compliance requirements for your organization. The most important to look for include the following:

• HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) set the standards for shielding sensitive patient data, which is now a necessity for healthcare organizations.
• A program initiated by the state bureaus and FBI, namely the CJIS (Criminal Justice Information Services), in order to identify the precautions to be taken in regards to fingerprint records, criminal background, and other information gathered by the agencies of law enforcement.

4.    Location

Traditionally, organizations have to physically move data to an outside location. Following a disaster, accessing this data resulted in unhappy customers, displaced employees, and long downtimes.

With DRaaS, organizations can now store their most crucial data offsite in a cloud that is best suitable for their business needs. Florida’s Department of Agriculture did exactly the same by bringing in DRaaS partner DSM to support their DR initiatives. Now, their most crucial data is tucked away in Tallahassee, which is a new location away from their headquarters. Thus, there’s no best time to prepare for disaster than the present. Your time and business can be saved when knowing what and when to look for the best disaster recovery solutions that are right for you.
 

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.