Disasters happen in the blink of an eye.
An earthquake, a hurricane, or a computer virus can bring down your business within minutes. From ransomware to power outages, hardware failure, natural disasters, and human error, data loss can happen at any time.
Disaster recovery (DR) is one of the most important aspects of any type of organization. It's an organizational effort to prepare for and subsequently mitigate the effects of a natural or technological disaster.
While most businesses have some backup solution in place, few have proper disaster recovery plans (DRPs) and use disaster recovery solutions in the event of a major problem. Worst of all, the small percentage of companies with a DRP in place often fail to maintain it properly. This situation can be catastrophic if there's a disaster, leading to massive amounts of downtime, loss of data, and loss of customers.
Disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) is quickly becoming a popular model for enabling DR and data protection in the modern era of cloud computing. It provides an agile alternative to traditional disaster recovery methods while saving money and offering higher levels of reliability.
What is DRaaS?
DRaaS, also known as business continuity-as-a-service (BCaaS), is a cloud computing service that aims to provide backup and disaster recovery services over the Internet. It has become an essential solution for businesses of all sizes to protect their critical applications, data, and network infrastructure in an environment that is becoming increasingly virtualized, distributed, and mobile.
DRaaS uses the cloud to replace traditional backup software and hardware. DRaaS is a part of the nomenclature of cloud computing, along with platform-as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS).
DRaaS software offers three key benefits: faster recovery, lower cost, and better security. With a DRaaS offering, a company’s data isn’t typically lost forever. While a traditional backup may contain only a tiny fraction of the company’s data, having the entire backup stored somewhere else in the cloud – even if only temporarily – is nothing short of revolutionary for businesses.
When disaster strikes, it can take businesses offline for days or even weeks. When companies are offline, they miss out on valuable sales, lose the trust of their customers, and are unable to respond to customer issues. DRaaS can help your business avoid downtime when disaster strikes.
With the migration from traditional DR to DRaaS, companies have protection against physical disruptions with better triggers and configuration options. This means that they can be up and running again quickly after an event. DRaaS also eliminates a lot of the on-premises equipment and setup costs associated with traditional replication models.
Key terminologies used in disaster recovery
The road to DR is paved with the best of intentions. It's more of a concept rather than a discrete technology. Nonetheless, knowing the terminology related to disaster recovery is critical to ensuring that a business is adequately informed during the planning phase and in the event of an incident.
Here are the definitions of some frequently-used DR terms.
- Business continuity: Business continuity is an umbrella term that includes a more extensive set of procedures that, when incorporated, ensures a business' operational uptime.
- Failover: Failover is the process of moving business operations to a secondary location for recovery. For example, if a data center goes down, then a business' emergency recovery strategy would involve a failover to a site that they have chosen ahead of time. It's the primary goal once the level of damage surpasses the maximum acceptable outage.
- Failback: Failback is the method of restoring systems and processes to their pre-disaster condition. As soon as teams can stabilize the root cause for the disruption, the organization can initiate a failback process.
- Hot site: Hot site is a traditional DR approach in which the company duplicates the whole environment (applications, data, and documents) to a remote, physical location. A hot site is expensive regarding investment and upkeep.
- Cold site: A cold site is a traditional DR method in which an organization sets up a remote backup center with little to no hardware installed. It's an office space equipped with electricity, a cooling system, air conditioning, and communication equipment, among other things. Following a disaster, the company sends backup media to the remote facility.
- Warm site: A warm site DR process amalgams both hot and cold site DR approaches. There may be servers on the secondary site, but they may be out of date. It takes much longer (typically a few days or more) to recover data from a warm site than it does from a hot site, but it's also much less costly.
- Mission-critical: Systems or programs that are critical to the operation and processes of an enterprise are termed mission-critical.
- Service-level agreement: A service-level agreement (SLA) is a contract that specifies the scope of services and self-imposed commitments by a vendor to offer a certain level of performance and uptime for a business' systems and data. SLAs are a legally enforceable means of measurement that connects a DR service's advertised promises to the experience of its execution during a disaster.
- Recovery point objective: Recovery point objective (RPO) is a data-related factor. It's a point in time within which an organization must retrieve data according to its disaster recovery plan. In other words, the RPO is what a company considers to be an "acceptable risk" in case of a catastrophe. The RPO decides which replication method is necessary to restore and rebuild from an outage (for example, nightly backups, snapshots, continuous replication). Leading companies measure this in seconds.
- Recovery time objective: Recovery time objective (RTO) is the amount of time required to resume a business operation following an interruption before facing unacceptable consequences, such as regulatory penalties, customer defection, or financial loss. RTO starts after a crisis occurs and continues until all services are operational. Leading companies measure this in minutes.
- Maximum tolerable period of disruption: Maximum tolerable period of disruption (MTPD) is a factor of time. It's the maximum time a business' critical services will be inaccessible before intolerable effects occur.
- Business impact analysis: A business impact analysis (BIA) is a procedure that examines the possible consequences of a disaster or emergency impacting critical business operations. It allows for the exploration of any vulnerabilities as well as developing risk-mitigation techniques.
Want to learn more about Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) Solutions? Explore Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) products.
DRaaS vs. DR: How are they different?
In traditional disaster recovery, a secondary data center hosts physical IT infrastructure. The DR solution then replicates mission-critical data from the primary site to a secondary location regularly. The replicated workload at the secondary site is kept in a state of dormancy until a failover trigger reanimates it for use.
The secondary site is always far enough away from the primary site to prevent both data centers from being affected by the same disruption. If using legacy DR, teams must have the necessary IT skills to support testing and recovery.
93%
of businesses without DR who suffer a major data disaster are out of business within one year.
Source: PhoenixNAP
On the other hand, DRaaS is a cloud-based DR solution that allows businesses to host their replication site on the cloud. This virtualized DR solution can be used in conjunction with a cloud or physical environment, allowing companies to rapidly transform a secondary recovery site into a primary production site in the event of a disruption.
One of the main differences between DRaaS and traditional DR offerings is that DRaaS does not require dedicated secondary data centers. The disaster recovery services providers store multiple customers’ data in their own data centers. This means businesses can save on upfront hardware and costs because they do not have to purchase secondary servers for a second site location.
DRaaS is quick to set up and maintain, making it simple to test and recover. Companies pay only for storage while replication of workload occurs at the secondary site. This secondary storage is always in a state of dormancy. Only when the failover is triggered, businesses have to pay for memory and CPU resources.
How does DRaaS work?
Like most IT platforms, DRaaS is organized around a base “plan,” which includes detailed hardware and software configurations. Built-in tools such as the automatic merging of data from various data sources and major backup systems make DRaaS implementation quick and easy for an organization.
The major distinction between conventional DR and DRaaS is the latter's cloud computing and managed service aspect. The same basic processes of DR are present in both legacy DR systems and DRaaS: replication, failover, and failback.
Replication
If critical applications and systems are dedicated in the DRP of an organization to secure them, then backups with supporting data are taken with a frequency in line with the RPO specifications. Once a batch of snapshots is complete, it's replicated to the target DRaaS data center and is sorted based on the first-in-first-out (FIFO) algorithm. The most recent backup is used during failover if there's a disaster.
Failover
In the case of a disruption, triggering a failover event transfers data from the primary data center to the DRaaS data center, where applications and data are kept up-to-date from the most recent instance of backup. With the right DRaaS provider, this transfer step is easy to handle. Another great feature that some DRaaS vendors provide is an automatic backup when applications are in failover mode, thereby allowing graceful failback and zero data loss. The automated process continues until the company can restore the primary data center operations.
Failback
Failback is the method of restoring end-user access to the primary data center after the resolution of the disruption. The three-phase process of DRaaS resets after failback is complete, and the system prepares itself for the next crisis.
For businesses, the above three phases are a straightforward and repeatable process that simplifies the management of data in case a disaster occurs. For example, if a hurricane hits a remote data center and all local backups are wiped out, DRaaS solutions can restore only the most recent backup stored on the cloud.
Unlike a traditional backup, a DRaaS virtual machine (VM) doesn’t involve the expensive and laborious process of physically copying hundreds or thousands of gigabytes of data to tape. The result is lower costs and higher flexibility.
It’s also quite possible that the DRaaS service provider will handle disaster recovery on a one-to-one basis with a single engineer or a few private contractors. In this case, all of the time, effort, and cost are already covered by the provider. Typically, the DRaaS provider recommends a standard SLA to set performance targets and maintain the vendor-client relationship.
DRaaS vs. cloud DR – what's the difference?
DR functionalities are now far more available than previously since the cloud replaces a secondary data center. Even then, as the cloud has progressed as a DR platform, two major cloud-based DR systems have emerged: DRaaS and cloud DR.
Although some people mistakenly use these terms interchangeably, most businesses work hard to understand all the available options and if one is more fitting than the other.
Cloud DR
Traditionally, usage of the word cloud DR has been vague. Cloud DR has been described as the process of using the cloud as a backup target or replicating backup snapshots to dedicated cloud storage. Technically speaking, these procedures are the same as cloud backup rather than cloud DR.
True cloud DR utilizes the ability to failover a workload to a cloud-based VM in the event of a disaster. While DRaaS solutions do the same thing, there's one significant difference between the two approaches. Cloud DR is more of a DIY solution. For example, businesses can use IaaS cloud platforms such as AWS or Microsoft Azure in place of a secondary data center. It's up to them to sort out how to migrate operations to the cloud and, if necessary, trigger a failover.
Advantage: Cloud DR is a more flexible solution for businesses to exercise the freedom to build a platform that fully satisfies their needs.
Disadvantage: Cloud DR necessitates a high level of experience with cloud-based DR. Businesses need in-house expertise with cloud services, DR strategies, virtual networking, and other disciplines to apply this DIY approach.
DRaaS
DRaaS solutions specialize in cloud-based DR. Solution providers have a ready-to-use system for data replication and failover. DRaaS providers also have resources to assist organizations in performing a failback once the root cause of the disruption has been resolved.
DRaaS and cloud DR are two distinct methods that work toward the same goal.
Advantage: DRaaS software is easier to use and apply to the entire organization.
Disadvantage: Because DRaaS is a pre-built platform, it's not as flexible as cloud DR. In fact, some DRaaS vendors provide data protection in a one-size-fits-all solution.
DRaaS vs. BaaS
IT recovery solutions have grown in popularity due to modern hardware and infrastructure advancements required to provide reliable backup services on-site or remotely via a private cloud. The most prevalent cloud service models used by companies looking to protect their mission-critical data are backup-as-a-service (BaaS) and DRaaS.
BaaS
Organizations can use BaaS to backup company workload and whole data repositories to a protected data center off-site. BaaS is an excellent option for businesses that want to move on from regular file backups.
BaaS provides IT teams with a professionally controlled and protected online method for sensitive information. By periodically replicating files to an encrypted physical or virtual server in a safe off-site venue, BaaS helps minimize risks.
BaaS is preferred for businesses if:
- It's easy to rebuild the infrastructure
- Factors such as RPO and RTO are flexible
- The organization isn't concerned with software or web service maintenance
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DRaaS
DRaaS makes use of the cloud as a protected secondary location where replicated data and image backups of disk drives, physical servers, and infrastructure are stored. The recovery environment will still have the most up-to-date version of the systems thanks to continuous data replication. The backup snapshots of the systems help businesses rebuild their infrastructure much faster than reinstalling an operating system and copying all of the corresponding files.
DRaaS is an excellent choice for businesses if:
- The IT infrastructure is complex
- The data requirements are rapidly growing
- The added cost of maintaining a DRaaS system is worth the potential losses from application downtime
- The organization uses software or web services that require a 24/7 availability
Benefits of DRaaS
The speed at which technology is changing leaves many businesses behind and scrambling to stay on top of their data recovery services. With cloud computing, the Internet of things (IoT), and bring your own device (BYOD) policies becoming the norm in business, it's more important than ever that a company's data recovery services are up to date with the latest technology.
Most businesses have some form of a recovery strategy, but they often find themselves woefully unprepared when it comes to the crunch. The idea of total data loss is so daunting that many IT departments prefer to hope for the best and ignore the worst-case scenario. However, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
DRaaS is becoming a popular cloud computing trend. The service offers companies cloud-based DR solutions that are easy to implement, quick to deploy, and cost-effective.
Here are four benefits of adopting DRaaS:
- Faster recovery time: The longer it takes for a company to recover from a disruption, the more revenue it will lose. In-house DR solutions can take a long time to recover, but a DRaaS solution can usually get systems up and running in 15 minutes or fewer. Companies can choose how their mission-critical systems are protected and tailor their required recovery scope based on their needs and RPO and RTO recovery objectives.
- Reduced costs: DRaaS allows businesses to eliminate the expense of setting up a secondary storage site. Installing the hardware and software licensing to allow a successful failover from the primary data center to the secondary location is the process. It needs specialized knowledge to handle the DRP. Cloud-based DRaaS, on the other hand, is much less expensive than legacy DR and allows users to benefit from resource sharing. There are no upfront costs; businesses pay for a subscription.
- Improved security: To hold data safely in the cloud and secured away from the primary location, DRaaS providers use cutting-edge technology with seamless redundancy. A company can also tailor DRaaS solutions to suit their specific security and enforcement needs, such as GDPR compliance. DRaaS assists organizations in meeting compliance standards by offering the measures required to track and protect vital and sensitive data.
- Scalability: One of the most important benefits of cloud services over physical infrastructures is more effortless scalability. DRaaS vendors provide an upward and outward scalability approach that can handle multiple VMs, databases, and storage locations as required at a fraction of the cost. In contrast to DRaaS, legacy DR involves a higher cost of buying the appropriate equipment to scale up.
Challenges of DRaaS
As cloud computing becomes increasingly popular, organizations are looking for ways to safely and securely use the cloud. One of the most efficient ways to do this is through DRaaS. Although it's becoming increasingly popular, IT teams must address some challenges to implement DRaaS properly.
Here are three challenges of DRaaS:
- Trusting the service provider: The potential threats associated with DRaaS are mostly about trusting the DRaaS service provider. If a disruption happens, the business is at the mercy of the third-party service provider with their mission-critical activities and the execution of the business continuity and DRP. That being said, selecting a service provider with verifiable recovery times and a proven track record will significantly minimize the risk involved.
- Security concerns: Since replication of sensitive business data occurs in the cloud, data security is essential. It's vital to check whether the DRaaS vendor has extensive security resources to ensure that mission-critical information is safe and accessible. Working with a vendor that conforms to security standards like ISO 27k and industry standards like PCI DSS, FFIEC, and HIPAA can minimize data losses. Vendors with several data centers with redundant storage facilities to store mission-critical data in more than one location also reduce the risk of data loss.
- Mismanaged DR planning: A DRaaS vendor customizes the service according to a business' specifications. As a result, it's critical to do a rigorous review of DR requirements in RTOs, RPOs, and choosing mission-critical activities. A mismanaged DRP can lead to an increased downtime and loss of revenue.
Types of DRaaS
Before choosing a vendor, businesses should also consider the three major categories of DRaaS options offered by service providers: self-service, assisted, and managed. Though there may be minor differences between these models, DRaaS providers usually fall into one of these three categories.
Self-service DRaaS
A self-service DRaaS model provides a business with tools and resources to perform its own DR backups and recovery planning. It's the least expensive alternative, which ensures that companies manage the end-to-end DR process.
This means that the IT team is entirely responsible for carrying out the recovery process if a crisis occurs. Self-service DRaaS is ideal for organizations with in-house DR experience and IT bandwidth to control the recovery environment.
Managed DRaaS
A managed DRaaS model ensures that the service provider is in charge of the planning, testing, and managing of the DR strategy. A managed DRaaS provider can handle almost all facets of DR, allowing IT teams to offload their DR concerns and concentrate on other core business priorities.
In the case of a crisis, a managed DRaaS contractor handles the DR with a platform-agnostic technology that provides failover on-premises or across cloud providers. A managed DRaaS model is the most expensive option among all the different types of DRaaS models.
Assisted DRaaS
In an assisted DRaaS model, the DRaaS provider serves as an adviser to the organization to introduce, evaluate, and manage the ideas in the supported model. Vendors handle the weakest areas of DR expertise and let businesses be in charge of all facets of the company's DR process, including testing, integration, and validation. If a disruption happens, the DRaaS provider can provide additional support and step in to assist with failover and failback.
Assisted DRaaS options are less expensive when compared to the managed DRaaS option.
DRaaS software providers
DRaaS is a cloud-based DR service that supports a business' DR strategy by offering a global or regional failover site and RPO of seconds. DRaaS is a cost-effective alternative to on-premises DR solutions. Its global site service with managed recovery points allows companies to increase resilience during a worldwide or regional disaster.
DRaaS provides companies with remote data center replicas to protect against risks and reduce downtime from planned or unplanned events.
A vendor must meet the following criteria to be included in the DRaaS category:
- Restore networks and infrastructure to their pre-failure state
- Offer on-premises or cloud storage failover and recovery capability
- Allow for both manual and automatic recovery
- Enable companies to locally track when, how, and where data and systems are restored
- Ability to connect to other management and backup solutions
- Compatibility for a wide range of on-premise and cloud infrastructure equipment
*Below are the five leading DRaaS software platforms from G2's Spring 2021 Grid® Report. Some reviews may be edited for clarity.
1. Zerto
Zerto is a storage software provider specializing in enterprise business continuity, and DR. Zerto is transforming the way DR, replication, and cloud adoption are handled with a single IT Resilience Platform. Zerto's platform provides seamless availability at the enterprise level with an always-on user experience while optimizing workload mobility to secure, restore, and transfer applications seamlessly through hybrid cloud environments.
What users like:
"We leverage Zerto for DR failover between our primary and secondary data centers. We put all of our critical Tier 1 applications into Zerto replication groups to fail them over in case of an emergency. We have also used Zerto for data center consolidations and migrations since it's a great tool. We like the flexibility that Zerto provides us and its overall ease of use."
- Zerto Review, Mark M.
What users dislike:
"The product is rather expensive but is comparable to other enterprise-class DR and data protection solutions."
- Zerto Review, Srichand J.
2. Unitrends Data Center Backup and Recovery
Unitrends Data Center Backup and Recovery is an all-in-one backup device that simplifies data and server backup from local to cloud storage. Unitrends backup tools provide analytics to anticipate and avoid outages. It also uses artificial intelligence (AI) that alerts businesses about potential ransomware infection and hardware failures.
What users like:
"The best part for me was the "set it and forget it" approach. I don't have time to track down backup errors every day, and Unitrends solved that problem for me. Once we set up the schedule, I never had a single issue with my backups.
The other thing that I was impressed by was the user interface. It was intuitive and saved time when trying to do backups and restores."
- Unitrends Data Center Backup and Recovery Review, David F.
What users dislike:
"On occasion, I have run into issues with the web interface not wanting to load. This can be a little bit of a headache when needing to use the interface. Usually, a Unitrends reboot fixes the issue."
- Unitrends Data Center Backup and Recovery Review, Garret H.
3. Bluelock
Bluelock by Intervision Cloud Disaster Recovery offers business continuity and DR processes that focus on performing business process analysis, determining continuity goals, and identifying actions to mitigate the consequences of a disruption.
It collects data from resources and main internal sources to provide recommendations for spending and recovery capability through a single, centralized dashboard. Through the customized DRaaS tools, businesses can protect confidential data while smoothly bridging any disruption.
What users like:
"Bluelock's solution works as advertised. Once implemented, the team is constantly working with you to maintain the solution and verify that it continues to meet the organization's needs. The solutions they offer are extremely flexible. Everyone from sales to technical support is knowledgeable and available to help in any way. I've been dealing with IT vendors for almost 20 years, and Bluelock is one of the best."
- Bluelock Review, Ben V.
What users dislike:
"Billing can be complex, especially as we adjust the services we purchase."
- Bluelock Review, Tom M.
4. Datto
Datto is a fully-featured, complete data security platform offered in a single optimized kit. Designed to safeguard their client data, SIRIS 3 provides two-factor authentication and the immutable Datto Cloud to provide an all-in-one solution for backup and disaster recovery.
Datto SIRIS also protects any physical, virtual, or cloud infrastructure running on operating systems such as Windows, Mac, or Linux with ease.
What users like:
"Datto allows you to create a full image backup, as it allows you to restore virtual machines when a server fails, either to run locally on a backup server or in the cloud. Datto performs great as a Backup Report page when it comes to reports, displaying information from Screenshots, forced backups, and scheduled backups. The screenshot verification feature can capture and restore points created by the relevant agent."
- Datto Review, Alvaro M.
What users dislike:
"The big downside of the Datto device is the cost. It may be too expensive for most companies. Even though I think Datto SIRIS works great, I would like to see stronger outcomes."
- Datto Review, Jonathan C.
5. Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery is a DRaaS platform that provides DR processes. Businesses use Site Recovery to deploy backup, failover, and recovery processes to help keep mission-critical applications going during scheduled and unplanned outages.
What users like:
"Creating a complex data infrastructure is easy to achieve with Azure data Recovery, which maintains security at all times so that you can work with multiple connections between different types of services without the information becoming fragile at any time. This means that there's no way for data to be affected by any malware or external software that is not related to or allowed by the company.
Azure Site Recovery creates replicas of VMs that are used in other regions of the company with fantastic speed and adds all the information to the physical server being used."
- Azure Site Recovery Review, Kathryn W.
What users dislike:
"There's limited hypervisor support other than for Microsoft and VMWare platforms. The solution needs to add more support for Citrix and KVM platforms."
- Azure Site Recovery Review, Sheahan K.
Business continuity in the cloud
As the adoption of public cloud services for business IT systems continues to rise, DRaaS is becoming a more prominent option for many organizations. As a result, understanding this service is critical for disaster recovery that keeps up with ever-changing market models and data management needs.
To ensure that DRaaS operates, it's often helpful to engage with market leaders to collaborate with you to make the best decision. DRaaS is one way to ensure that your business can recover quickly.
Why lose your precious storage space in your devices when you can store everything on a cloud? Learn how cloud storage is easing business problems with data management.
Keerthi Rangan
Keerthi Rangan is a Senior SEO Specialist with a sharp focus on the IT management software market. Formerly a Content Marketing Specialist at G2, Keerthi crafts content that not only simplifies complex IT concepts but also guides organizations toward transformative software solutions. With a background in Python development, she brings a unique blend of technical expertise and strategic insight to her work. Her interests span network automation, blockchain, infrastructure as code (IaC), SaaS, and beyond—always exploring how technology reshapes businesses and how people work. Keerthi’s approach is thoughtful and driven by a quiet curiosity, always seeking the deeper connections between technology, strategy, and growth.
