Data Replication
as a Service (DRaaS)
The key difference between traditional DR and DRaaS is the managed service aspect of DRaaS. The same fundamental phases of DR exist in both cases: replication, failover, and failback. Disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) could be an ideal fit if you are a small-to-medium-sized business (SMB), are a growing company that requires flexibility, or have no internal resources or bandwidth to manage this specific software or hardware.
DRaaS enables you to forgo the exorbitant capital and operational costs of building, equipping, and managing another datacentre. Virtualization to reduce storage requirements, as well as data backups, security, and recovery from man-made or natural disasters can be done by Infotech integrated solutions.
DRaaS enables you to forgo the exorbitant capital and operational costs of building, equipping, and managing another datacentre. Virtualization to reduce storage requirements, as well as data backups, security, and recovery from man-made or natural disasters can be done by Infotech integrated solutions.
Replication
When applications are earmarked for protection in a company’s DR plan, stateful snapshots are taken with accompanying data at a frequency consistent with RPO requirements. Once a batch of snapshots is taken, it is replicated to the DRaaS target datacentre, which stores groups of snapshots in a first-in-first-out (FIFO) algorithm. The most recent snapshots become the primary targets for failover during a disaster.
Failover
When a disaster strikes, initiating a failover event transitions end-user access to applications and data from the primary datacentre to the DRaaS datacentre, where applications and data have been spun up from the latest instance of replicated snapshots. This transition process, with the right vendor, is simple to manage. Good DRaaS services also include automatic snapshotting while applications run in failover mode, enabling graceful failback and zero loss of data, once normal primary datacentre operations are restored.
What are the Benefits
of Disaster Recovery as a Service?
- Rapid recovery with minimal downtime – with DRaaS, businesses can continue to operate and restore important resources within hours or even minutes, depending on SLAs.
- A cost-efficient solution – due to economies of scale, DRaaS is able to offer a point of entry for otherwise cost-prohibited organizations to effectively protect their businesses from the ramifications of IT downtime.
- Increased flexibility – traditional considerations, such as infrastructure, power and rent, IT staffing, and licensing, are all rolled into a single service.
- Resource optimization – since DRaaS is a cloud-based solution, usage is elastic, ensuring customers only consume and pay for what they need. This is superior in most cases to more expensive customer-owned/operated DR datacentres since capacity must be paid for upfront “just in case.”
Failback
Once a disaster is mitigated, failback is the process of transitioning end-user access back to the primary datacentre. Once failback is complete, the three-phase process resets and the system readies itself for the next disaster.
DRaaS vs
Backup as a Service (BaaS)
DRaaS protects applications and data whereas BaaS protects only the latter. From a business continuity perspective, DRaaS is a type of superset of BaaS in the sense that it includes compute services in order to facilitate application continuity for clients in addition to the data backup services required to support said applications. DRaaS also offers application-level protection policies and runbook automation to orchestrate failover/failback/testing. BaaS solutions are more manually intensive, less elegant, and more time consuming to achieve the same end a DRaaS solution does.
