DRaaS is an acronym that just about every IT pro understands. Short for disaster recovery as a service, DRaaS is a cloud computing service model that lets you replicate your systems, data, and applications to a third-party cloud computing environment so they can be recovered and restored.
DRaaS is a game-changer when it comes to data protection. And it couldn’t have arrived on the scene at a better time because threats are coming at you from every direction. The numbers say it all. There were 5.6 billion malware attacks and 4.8 trillion intrusion attempts in 2020. So, it’s no wonder projections show the global DRaaS market growing at about a 40 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) by 2026.
Let’s take a look at the drivers behind the growth of DRaaS.
1. Built for Business Continuity
For IT teams, protecting your data is your first priority. With a robust DRaaS solution, even a site-wide disaster that destroys or renders your onsite and offsite backups unavailable shouldn’t affect your ability to recover. With your data safely stored in the cloud, you can count on fast recovery from any disaster—from ransomware attacks to hurricanes.
There plenty of other features and functionality choices to be found in the DRaaS product universe. Take uptime, for example. You want your data always to be available wherever and whenever you need it. StorageCraft Cloud Services, which uses a highly distributed and fault-tolerant disaster recovery cloud, guarantees 99.999+ percent uptime.
2. Cost-Effective Data Protection
While you should always keep an offsite or off-network copy of your data (as outlined in our take on the traditional 3-2-1 backup rule), DRaaS also helps you keep your data center costs under control. While you’ll still need to invest in software for servers, storage, and security, you’ll find DRaaS delivers savings because you don’t need to invest in hardware. That, in turn, reduces the amount of space you need for your secondary data center, along with associated power, cooling, and connectivity costs. And it also reduces the IT time involved with keeping all of that hardware up to date.
3. Less Complexity
Just building and maintaining a secondary disaster recovery site, as noted, can be costly. It also adds another level of IT complexity. Better DRaaS solutions let you centrally manage every aspect of your cloud backup and recovery with an easy-to-use, self-service online portal. StorageCraft Cloud Services goes one step further, with security and privacy measures that ensure that only you can access stored backup images. And StorageCraft Cloud Services even makes it as easy as pressing a single button to test or start a site-wide failover process. That’s data protection made simple.
4. Easy Interoperability
DRaaS solutions operate independently from your hardware, software, and applications. StorageCraft ShadowXafe data protection software, which is tightly integrated with Cloud Services, works with—and even lets you recover to—dissimilar hardware or virtual environments. That interoperability gives you more recovery options if disaster strikes.
5. Comprehensive Data Protection
Last but certainly not least, DRaaS gives you a complete disaster recovery solution that translates into the highest level of data protection. We need only refer you back to paragraph one of this post and those 5.6 billion malware attacks to drive home the fact that DRaaS could well be the best way to ensure you have a business to protect after an attack hits you.
Originally published on the StorageCraft Blog, June 24, 2021.
