The best way to protect against natural disasters, cyber attacks and other business disruptions is to have a well-planned and tested disaster recovery plan. However, it can be hard to know how serious a disaster might be or when it might occur. Fortunately, with the right technology, businesses can minimize downtime and keep data safe, even in a disaster scenario.
Disaster recovery cloud services help companies build resilient IT infrastructure by backing up and replicating applications, data and other IT resources to a remote offsite server. This ensures that if a disaster does strike, it will be quickly and easily recovered to an unaffected location, keeping business operations up and running with minimal interruption.
The cloud can be a cost-effective and reliable resource for disaster recovery, providing the backup and resilience that organizations need to ensure business continuity. Disaster recovery cloud solutions can also be deployed on a “pilot light” configuration, which means the backup infrastructure is turned off and only activated when needed, saving costs and ensuring that the solution is ready to go when it is required.
In a true Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) configuration, the IT infrastructure is replicated in a fail-safe environment on virtual servers hosted by the cloud provider. This solution is often less expensive than a traditional DR implementation, since the company only pays for what they use. This allows the organization to maintain a high uptime objective, while eliminating IT expenses for hardware and software.
Regardless of the type of DRaaS solution, it is important to test these systems regularly to ensure that they will work as expected during an IT disaster. Most DRaaS providers offer regular testing at no additional cost to their customers, which makes it easy to test and improve the effectiveness of an IT disaster recovery strategy without disrupting business operations.
When evaluating potential solutions for IT disaster recovery, companies should consider whether they need to retain responsibility for all aspects of the DR process or if it would be beneficial to collaborate with the DRaaS provider to create a mutually agreed upon strategy. In this collaboration model, the DRaaS vendor provides their expertise for optimizing IT disaster recovery processes while the customer is responsible for implementing all or some of the resulting procedures.
The best disaster recovery cloud services include backup and replication capabilities, as well as automation features that help reduce manual processes during an IT disaster. For example, a solution like NAKIVO Backup & Replication can store multiple copies of backed-up VMs in the cloud and use automated re-IP to change IP settings on the VM replicas when failover occurs. This helps organizations to automatically connect the VMs to the DR site’s network, reducing downtime during the recovery process. Additionally, these types of solutions should offer encryption both at rest and in transit to protect backup data from viruses and cyberattacks. This protects against malicious actions that might impact the data or cause it to be accidentally tampered with during recovery, which could have disastrous consequences for an organization. draas solutions