The Promise of DRaaS
Whatever the company size or industry, the truth is that your business can’t afford downtime but traditional DR strategy investments have been difficult to justify.
Most organizations try to protect only mission critical applications, leaving second-tier, but still valuable, systems vulnerable to extended outages. It’s hard to justify improving your disaster recovery capabilities when you’re under pressure to cut IT costs and when DRaaS is seen as an expensive insurance policy.
There has been a direct correlation between speed of recovery and cost – the faster you wanted to recover, the more it’s going to cost you. But are cloud-based DR solutions a way to achieve the recovery capabilities of advanced DR services at a more affordable price? Leveraging the cloud for disaster recovery gives small and medium-sized business the same capabilities that larger companies have had for years, as well as offering all organizations a cost-saving solution that will meet business requirements while reducing the time, money, and resources expended.
With DRaaS, disaster recovery becomes much more cost-effective with significantly faster recovery times. Now, let’s compare DRaaS to more traditional DR approaches:
TAPE
BACKUP
The biggest strike against tape backup systems is speed – it may take days to recover your data. It just takes time to recover the tape, restore the files, and then rebuild the applications.
CLOUD
BACKUP
Cloud backup can certainly be much faster than tape, but organizations are often throttled by the size of their internet pipe and the amount of data they have to protect. Companies with lots of data to protect or that have stringent RTO requirements quickly outgrow their direct-to-cloud backup solution. Plus, they are more ideal for file and folder backup vs. VM or application-level backups.
BACKUP
APPLIANCES
Purpose-built backup appliances are much faster than tape, but you often pay more for the box. Backup appliances are also limited by storage capacity – once it reaches capacity, you need to purge data or upgrade to a larger (more expensive) appliance. These appliances have not traditionally had the ability to spin up VMs, but this is changing as more appliance vendors are bolting on cloud functionality – but this does not necessarily equate to having enterprise-grade DRaaS functionality.
COLD SITE
STANDBY
With cold site standby, a secondary site acts as backup of another identical primary system. It will be installed and configured only when the primary site breaks down for the first time. Subsequently, In the case of a failure in the primary the secondary site is powered on and the data restored before finally starting the failed application or server. Data from primary system can be backed up on a storage system and restored on secondary system as and when required. This generally provides a recovery time of a few hours.
WARM
STANDBY
With warm standby, the secondary site will have hardware and connectivity already established, though on a smaller scale than the original production site or even a hot site. Warm sites might have backups on hand, but they may not be complete and may be between several days and a week old. Data is regularly mirrored to secondary system using disk based replication or shared disk. This generally provides a recovery time of a few minutes.
HOT
STANDBY
A hot (secondary) site is a duplicate of the original site of the organization, with full computer systems as well as near-complete backups of user data. Data is mirrored in near real time and both systems will have identical data. Data replication is typically done through the software’s capabilities. This generally provides a recovery time of a few seconds. Because of the extra infrastructure, software, and bandwidth, hot standby recovery is usually very expensive.
ACTIVE-ACTIVE
(LOAD BALANCED)
In this method both the primary and secondary systems are active and processing requests in parallel. Data replication happens through software capabilities and would be bi-directional. This generally provides a recovery time that is instantaneous. As you probably guessed, this is about as expensive as it gets – but for organizations who depend on always-on availability (think online exchanges or e-commerce sites) they’re willing to spend big to prevent any downtime from ever occurring.
HOW DRaaS DIFFERS FROM BACKUPS
