Skip to main content

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS)


Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is the replication and hosting of physical or virtual servers by a third party to provide failover in the event of a natural catastrophe, power outage or another type of business disruption. 

Typically, DRaaS requirements and expectations are documented in a service-level agreement (SLA) and the third-party vendor provides failover to a cloud computing environment, either through a contract or on a pay-per-use basis. In the event of an actual disaster, an off-site vendor is less likely than the enterprise itself to suffer the direct and immediate effects, which enables the provider to implement the disaster recovery (DR) plan even in the event of the worst-case scenario: a total or near-total shutdown of the affected enterprise.

DRaaS offers an off-site DR capability that lets customers avoid the cost of maintaining secondary data centers. The approach has opened DR to organizations that wouldn't have been able to afford such a capability in the past.

How does DRaaS work

A DRaaS provider offers its infrastructure to serve as the customer's DR site when a disaster is declared. The provider's offering includes a mechanism of some kind, a software application or a hardware appliance, for example, for handling replication to a private cloud or public cloud platform.

In managed DRaaS, the provider takes responsibility for the failover process, transitioning users from the primary environment to its hosted service. The DRaaS provider also oversees the failback task, assisting customers ready to resume normal operations. Customers, however, might need to take on some or all of the management chores in other forms of DRaaS, such as attended DRaaS and self-service DRaaS.

Managed DRaaS can prove particularly valuable for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), which often lack in-house experts able to devise and execute a DR plan. The ability to outsource infrastructure is another plus for smaller organizations, which typically balk at the facilities and equipment costs of running a DR site.

DRaaS advantages and disadvantages

Disaster recovery as a service offers several business continuity (BC) benefits.

DRaaS advantages include:

  • Eliminates the need to establish and equip a secondary data center for DR purposes.
  • Doesn't require like-for-like duplication of storage hardware between the primary data center and the DR site.
  • Provides DR capabilities for SMBs that lack the necessary expertise to create an effective disaster recovery plan.
  • Frees in-house IT staff to focus on other systems, applications and projects.

DRaaS disadvantages include:

  • The business must trust its service provider to implement the plan in the event of a disaster and meet the defined recovery time objective(RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).
  • The customer must rely on a service provider's security when failover occurs.
  • Possible performance issues with applications running in the cloud.
  • The potential for bandwidth challenges, particularly with continuous data replication.

DRaaS vs. BaaS

DRaaS fails over processing to the cloud so an organization can continue to operate during a disaster. The failover notice can be automated or manual. The DRaaS operation remains in effect until IT can repair the on-premises environment and issue a failback order.

In backup as a service (BaaS), an organization decides which files it will back up to a BaaS provider's storage systems. The customer organization is also responsible for setting up its RTO and RPO service levels, as well as its backup windows. A BaaS provider is only responsible for data consistency and restoring backed up copies of data.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Black swan

A  black swan event  is an incident that occurs randomly and unexpectedly and has wide-spread ramifications. The event is usually followed with reflection and a flawed rationalization that it was inevitable. The phrase illustrates the frailty of inductive reasoning and the danger of making sweeping generalizations from limited observations. The term came from the idea that if a man saw a thousand swans and they were all white, he might logically conclude that all swans are white. The flaw in his logic is that even when the premises are true, the conclusion can still be false. In other words, just because the man has never seen a black swan, it does not mean they do not exist. As Dutch explorers discovered in 1697, black swans are simply outliers -- rare birds, unknown to Europeans until Willem de Vlamingh and his crew visited Australia. Statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses the phrase black swan as a metaphor for how humans deal with unpredictable events in his 2007...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)

A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a computer chip that performs rapid mathematical calculations, primarily for the purpose of rendering images. A GPU may be found integrated with a central processing unit (CPU) on the same circuit, on a graphics card or in the motherboard of a personal computer or server. In the early days of computing, the CPU performed these calculations. As more graphics-intensive applications such as AutoCAD were developed; however, their demands put strain on the CPU and degraded performance. GPUs came about as a way to offload those tasks from CPUs, freeing up their processing power. NVIDIA, AMD, Intel and ARM are some of the major players in the GPU market. GPU vs. CPU A graphics processing unit is able to render images more quickly than a central processing unit because of its parallel processing architecture, which allows it to perform multiple calculations at the same time. A single CPU does not have this capability, although multi...
Post a Comment
Read more

6G (sixth-generation wireless)

6G (sixth-generation wireless) is the successor to 5G cellular technology. 6G networks will be able to use higher frequencies than 5G networks and provide substantially higher capacity and much lower latency. One of the goals of the 6G Internet will be to support one micro-second latency communications, representing 1,000 times faster -- or 1/1000th the latency -- than one millisecond throughput. The 6G technology market is expected to facilitate large improvements in the areas of imaging, presence technology and location awareness. Working in conjunction with AI, the computational infrastructure of 6G will be able to autonomously determine the best location for computing to occur; this includes decisions about data storage, processing and sharing.  Advantages of 6G over 5G 6G is expected to support 1 terabyte per second (Tbps) speeds. This level of capacity and latency will be unprecedented and wi...
Post a Comment
Read more