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July 29, 2021

6 items to consider on Disaster Recovery (DRaaS)

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

Millions of organizations around the world experience man made or natural disasters. These can be anything from a horrible earthquake that destroys an office building to a malicious cyber attack that destroys your precious data. If an organization has been around enough, they have surely experienced some form of major interruption. How do they bounce back from them? What about that data they lost? Well, most of them have a failsafe in place called Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).

What is DRaaS?

DRaaS is a replica of either your virtual or physical servers that lives with a third party. In the event that your onsite data center was burned down and destroyed (hopefully this never happens), the third party would have all of your data and files stored safely at a different location so that you can resume business without interruption. This is also helpful in the event that a cyber attack corrupts some (or all) of your data. Whether you store all of your data virtually or on physical servers, it is important to have a disaster recovery plan in place. Human error is a very common form of data loss. New or tenured employees can make a mistake and delete full files of important information. If you have a plan in place, this is no big deal – you can retrieve those files from your backup servers or your third party.

Do all companies use a third party?

The short answer is no, not necessarily. Some large organizations have the ability to have an entire department dedicated to disaster recovery, which is often located in a different part of the country or world. Disaster Recovery as a Service, however, means that you are working with a third party to create a plan and trusting them to execute it in the event of a catastrophe.

Why is DRaaS Important?

DRaaS is one of the most important things you can do for your organization. You have likely invested a ton of time and resources into building a business,and losing valuable information can be extremely expensive. According to Ponemon Institute’s “Cost of Data Center Outages” study in 2016, unplanned downtime costs average $8,850 per minute. That is the average, meaning the number could be much higher or lower depending on the size of the organization and event that occurred. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) released a report highlighting that 43% of organizations affected by a natural disaster never reopen, and 23% close within two years of the event.

Heard about Ransomware?

READ MORE: DRaaS is one of the primary tactics in protecting your IT Infrastructure from ransomware hackerss.

Things to consider when choosing a DRaaS provider

  1. The costs for DRaaS are highly variable and it is important to understand the fees and what they cover before you sign on with a third party. If it is a subscription, what does it cover? What services would require additional fees?
  2. Ensure that you have a service level agreement (SLA) in place. This contract pre-defines your expectations from the third party and what they are responsible for. Example: getting your critical applications back up within 1 hour.
  3. Pay for what you need and use – choose providers who allow you customize and classify different applications as high or low priority. Not all businesses are the same so why would your disaster recovery be one-size fits all?
  4. Cloud seeding. This means you can use physical servers or hardware to pre-load data to the cloud. This is an option you may want to consider, so ask this question.
  5. Cloud application protection – do they offer services for backing up your cloud-based applications?
  6. Automated test recovery – the provider should offer automated testing once per month and after any infrastructure changes. This is just to prove that if there was an event, they will actually be able to recover your data.

We have a few options and partners for DRaaS available. If you are considering this service for your business, or have questions regarding your current service, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at ContactUs@Matrix-NDI.com or call 763-475-5500