One can site myriad of examples to drive home the significance of Disaster Recovery as a Service or DRaaS for safeguarding mission critical data.

However, the classic case of Toy Story 2 takes the cake.  The movie could never have seen the light of the day because the carefully restored files were lost thanks to a wrong command line. A single employee accidentally happened to possess a lone copy of the movie. The copy was with her only because she wanted to watch the movie at her home.

This was way back in 1998 when DRaaS was not available. But the event certainly underlined the need to for organizations that handle mission critical information to be prepared for such an eventuality.

Current scenario

If you happen to narrate the above-mentioned incidence to any cloud savvy individual, then he or she would not waste a moment to describe how the fiasco would have been averted if only DRaaS was accessible to Pixar.

Prior to the availability of DRaaS solution, the method of backing up mission critical files involved intricate procedures. However, DRaaS functionality empowers enterprises to instantly and reliably recover important information without any hassles or disruptions to day to day operations.

The advent of technology has allowed system admins to decide the Recovery Time Objective for a given server depending on the level of security. Therefore you can restore vital data on servers immediately and allow some time for other servers to get your hands on less important data.

Modern businesses are increasingly adopting cloud solutions for their data storage needs and need a cloud specific data recovery solution. The solution must be equipped to protect and backup their mission critical data.

Disaster Recovery as a Service satisfies all parameters of an ideal cloud based solution that can be adopted by organizations irrespective of their sizes. Moreover, the solution offers remarkable cost efficiency to because there has been a phenomenal rise in the number of enterprises adopting cloud based Disaster Recovery as a Solution.

Understanding DRaaS

Hosting and replication of servers irrespective of whether these are physical or virtual servers, with an aim to facilitate failover by the cloud provider are the principal objective of a Disaster Recovery Solution. The failover refers to backup of the ongoing business operations and the disaster can be in the form of an unexpected event including man-made disaster or any act of God.

Importance of DRaaS in business

Every business keeps on generating volumes of data that pertains to transactions, customer records such as their contact information, details of payments including credit card data, and much more. This information is considered as the foundation to help grow business operations.

It is obvious that if the business critical data is lost due to any catastrophic event, then the very existence of the business would be threatened. Disaster Recovery solutions enable protection and recovery of the data in the event of unforeseen events such as snow storms, earthquakes, tornadoes, fire, or any similar event that would impact business availability.

Enhancing DRaaS application’s efficiency

In order to explore the wide gamut of advantages of any DRaaS application, one needs to search for a right cloud service provider that facilitates regular testing of the application to ensure that it is capable of recovering applications as well as data. There are three fundamental approaches to improve DRaaS efficiency.

Preplanned testing of DRaaS

You need not get bogged down by DRaaS testing requirement because it will not disrupt your business processes. Thanks to the ability of DRaaS applications to combine SaaS automation with public cloud service, the performance of basic infrastructure is in no way hampered during periodic testing of DRaaS.

It takes not more than fifteen minutes to complete the testing process and causes no additional burden on IT personnel since the process does not call for checking system configurations.

Regular testing is the key

One needs to encourage employees to perfect their DRaaS testing abilities by practicing the process as frequently as possible. This will make the process of actual DRaaS much easier in the event of any unexpected event.  The employees are only required to validate the performance and functioning of various applications while the actual procedure of testing is the responsibility of cloud service provider.

Your cloud service provider executes most of the complex tasks and offers to deploy data replication functionality that is backed by high-end software applications. The replication ensures copying of wide spectrum of data including the updated payment methods as well as customer information.

By creating server images the CSP makes sure that these are stored on virtual machines that are built exclusively to house the replicated servers. The order of recovery is also fixed by including server backup and booting procedures.

Bottom-line

Your Cloud Service Provider assumes all responsibility for implementation and maintenance of DRaaS application. Therefore DRaaS is regarded as a simplified and high-performance application that guarantees great functionality at affordable costs.