5 reasons to consider disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS)
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is rapidly gaining popularity, and is offered by an increasing number of service providers.
DRaaS is defined as providing a remotely hosted disaster recovery service to protect a business's data and applications. When choosing the best DRaaS strategy, it can be helpful to examine the chief benefits. Here's a quick look at the top five reasons to consider DRaaS:
1. Reduce disaster recovery costs
Businesses that currently have a secondary site for disaster recovery purposes are surely familiar with the high costs associated with it. Beyond the unavoidable investments in replication software and the required software licenses for servers, storage, and security, there are a number of significant additional costs. Most of these additional costs are effectively eliminated by using DRaaS through a managed service provider. A DRaaS offering eliminates the need for the following expenses:
- Owning or leasing space for a secondary data center
- Monthly costs associated with power, cooling, and internet bandwidth at the secondary site
- Purchase or lease of servers, storage, and network equipment for the secondary site
- Travel to and from data centers or onsite staff at the secondary data center
2. Reduce complexity
As demonstrated in the list above, building and maintaining a secondary DR site can be both costly and complex. If all of that infrastructure could be eliminated, then the administration, upgrade requirements, and maintenance contracts could be eliminated as well.
3. Achieve interoperability
DRaaS solutions work with dissimilar systems so that businesses can protect servers across different hypervisors and replicate data between dissimilar storage systems. These DRaaS solutions are hardware-, hypervisor-, and application-independent.
4. Reduce IT resources spent on DR
DRaaS can be deployed within hours or days (depending on the number of servers) as compared to the weeks or months it can take to build a secondary disaster recovery site. And by reducing complexity and simplifying the DR solution with a single provider, businesses and their IT groups save a tremendous amount of time—when compared to managing their own DR site.
5. Provide a comprehensive DR solution
Many times companies who implement their own disaster recovery site have to start by protecting the most critical servers first. In some cases, they are never able to protect all their servers. Because DRaaS is much easier and more affordable than do-it-yourself DR, many companies are able to protect all of their servers (physical and virtual) within a reasonable time frame and budget.
DRaaS solutions built on Carbonite DoubleTake™ provide the ability to respond on demand to workload protection and recovery needs with a single, easy-to-manage technology. Best of all, Carbonite DoubleTake solutions support even the most scalable hypervisor and cloud computing technologies by enabling many-to-one protection of physical, virtual, and cloud-based server workloads.