Why Disaster Recovery as a Service is Something Businesses Should Consider

Downtime leads to lost productivity, customers, and revenue and ultimately hurts your bottom-line. This is why no business can afford downtime and the negative consequences that come with it. It is vital to be prepared when disaster strikes. If you live in the path of regular natural disasters, you know how important it is to be prepared, however, many corporations and organizations don’t take precautions with their data in case of a disaster. This type of risk can lead to damaging results. Thus, it’s vital to be as prepared with our data, in the case of a disaster, as we would be with any other possible disaster.

Get Prepared with Disaster Recovery

The best way to prepare is to have the proper disaster recovery plan in place, which requires an effective disaster recovery service. What is disaster recovery as a service? Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is a cloud computing and backup service model that uses cloud resources to protect applications and data from the disruption caused by a disaster. This gives an organization a total system backup that allows for business continuity in the event of system failure. DRaaS is often offered in conjunction with a disaster recovery plan (DRP) or business continuity plan (BCP). DRaaS is also sometimes referred to as business continuity as a service (BCaaS). According to Scalar Market Research, “the DRaaS market exhibits significant growth and value, due to the increasing demand from the small and medium businesses opting for the third party resources for disaster recovery.”

Common Disaster Risk Sources

When it comes to protecting data, risks can be present at every corner. Whether it’s a natural disaster, weather-related, human caused, or technical issues, there are many disaster risks that you must be prepared to deal with.

• Natural disasters. Floods, fires, tornadoes, and earthquakes are some of the natural disasters that can strike at any time and destroy your vital data.
• Weather. Major storms such as hurricanes, blizzards, extreme temperatures, or high winds can lead to data loss as well.
• Human Causes. Many times data is lost because of human error, or willful attacks, such as cyber attacks, vandalism, theft, or even terrorism.
• Technical Issues. There are also many possible technical issues that lead to lost data, such as hardware or software that fails for any number of reasons.

Advantages of DRaaS

No one wants to lose important data without having a backup plan in place, no matter the cause. That’s true whether you’re using a personal computer at home or you have hundreds of thousands of corporate documents stored on servers in your business location. There are many advantages to implementing disaster recovery as a service. Let’s take a closer look at some of the most significant benefits of using DRaaS.

• Flexible, scalable solutions. Unlike most traditional backup methods, DRaaS offers more flexibility, including a variety of recovery scopes and methods. DRaaS is also scalable, meaning you can easily add on to your plan as needed.
• Building compliance into managed services. You can also easily build compliance boundaries and strategies into your DRaaS plan, which makes protecting your data easier.
• Onsite maintenance. Whenever your disaster recovery plan needs to be updated, managed or maintained with a DRaaS in place it can be easily serviced no matter where it’s housed.
• Location flexibility. Another factor that makes DRaaS easier to work with is that it can be located anywhere. Your DRaaS can be stored onsite or thousands of miles away, with both options offering easy implementation when disaster strikes.
• Removes the guesswork. When DRaaS is part of your disaster recovery plan you don’t have to wonder about your plan. You can rest easy knowing that your data is safe in the event of any kind of terrible disaster. You will work with a team of security professionals that will not only protect your data but will also provide you access to that data whenever you need it.

Don’t Leave Disaster Recovery to Chance

Disasters often happen unexpectedly. That’s one of the leading factors in what makes them so difficult to deal with. In fact, being unprepared for a disaster, no matter what kind, is often the key in determining how bad the damage ends up being. When people or companies are not prepared to act, the complications are always compounded. Thus, when disaster strikes you want to be prepared. That’s why having the right disaster recovery plan in place is so important.

Additional Resources on this Topic:
DR / Backup as a Service
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS)
Cyber and Network Security

Photo Credit: annie walker1 Flickr via Compfight cc

This article was first published on New Era Technology.