Key Features for Disaster Recovery-As-A-Service (DRaaS)

DRaaS has steadily become a more popular option to protect your critical services and applications. A Gartner survey in 2019 showed that businesses are now protecting an average of 255 virtualized x86 instances.  This is an increase of 53% from 2018 which indicates an increased adoption of DRaaS by larger organizations.

As you might expect, the DRaaS market is growing rapidly as well and today there are a wide array of different DRaaS providers. All of these providers have different approaches to DR as well as their own feature sets, capabilities and costs. This wide selection of vendors and capabilities can make picking a DRaaS solution complex and difficult. While there are too many DRaaS providers to list them all, some of the main companies in the DRaaS market include:

• Microsoft – Azure Site Recovery (ASR)
• iland – iland Secure DRaaS
• Recovery Point – Business Process Resilience (BPR)
• TierPoint – Cloud-to-Cloud Recovery
• InterVision – Bluelock Solutions
• IBM – Cyber Resilience Services, Resiliency Orchestration, Disaster Recovery as a Service
• Sungard Availability Services – Data Protection, Recovery Management, Workplace Recovery Services, and Cloud & Infrastructure Recovery
• BIOS Middle East – DRaaS and backup as a service (BaaS)
• Expedient – Expedient Push Button DR, On-Site Private Cloud with DRaaS
• Flexential – Essential, Prime and Premium DRaaS
• Veeam – Disaster Recovery as a Service
• VMware – VMware Site Recovery

As you begin to look into DRaaS solutions, the starting point is to identify your recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). In addition, you need to understand your organization’s overarching data center and cloud strategy.

Part of the evaluation process is to understand your business’s downtime impacts, regional availability requirements, and application modernization plans. Some of the key features to look for in a DRaaS implementation include:

• Source servers supported should be both virtual and physical
• Server image and production data must be replicated to the cloud
• Fully-managed services are supplied by the provider
• Assisted recovery is available where the provider is responsible for the recovery infrastructure
• The ability to deal with complex environments
• The ability to support multiple computing platforms (x86, ARM, IBM i, IBM z, etc.)
• Providers should support DR run book creation
• Automated failover and failback between on-premises and the cloud
• Network configuration is supplied for recovery operations
• Self-service offerings enable you to manage the DRaaS solution

The DRaaS market can be confusing but understanding your requirements and the capabilities offered by each DRaaS provider can help you to successfully navigate the DRaaS maze.