That’s why businesses need Disaster Recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) to back up their mission-critical data and emerge unscathed should a disaster occur. In this blog, we’ll provide comprehensive insights into DRaaS, its significance, benefits and implementation.

What is Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS)?

DRaaS is a cloud computing model that simplifies disaster recovery for organizations. It enables them to securely back up their data and IT systems in a third-party cloud environment. In this as-a-service model, organizations don’t need to own and manage all the resources for disaster recovery themselves; instead, the third-party service provider takes care of all disaster recovery coordination. In essence, DRaaS is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that ensures quick access and functionality restoration for IT infrastructure for an organization in the event of a disaster.

Many types of disaster recovery solutions are available in the market, such as Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS), disaster recovery and Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service, and users often confuse them with each other. That’s why understanding the difference between these recovery solutions before implementing one for your business is critical.

What is the difference between DR and DRaaS?

While DR and DRaaS have the same end goal, they differ in ownership, deployment, management, cost, scalability and testing. In DR, organizations own and manage their disaster recovery infrastructure, which typically involves substantial upfront and ongoing costs. On the other hand, DRaaS relies on third-party cloud resources and follows a subscription-based model with predictable expenses.

Moreover, DR requires in-house expertise for setup and maintenance, while third-party DRaaS providers handle much of the management. DRaaS also facilitates automated testing and maintenance, simplifying verification of recovery readiness.

What is the difference between BaaS and DRaaS?

BaaS is a fully managed enterprise cloud backup service that primarily focuses on safeguarding critical data, offering scheduled backups and facilitating recovery of individual files or data points in the event of full or partial data loss. It is designed for cost-efficient, long-term and off-site data retention, and is ideal for businesses looking to protect specific data without extensive system recovery needs.

In contrast, DRaaS encompasses comprehensive system recovery, including applications, infrastructure and data. It focuses on rapidly restoring entire IT systems and services, ensuring seamless business continuity after disasters or significant outages.

How does DRaaS work?

Instead of using the organization’s physical location that owns the workload, DRaaS replicates and hosts servers in a third-party vendor’s facilities. Once a disaster strikes and shuts down a customer’s site, the DR plan seamlessly activates within the vendor’s facilities, ensuring minimal downtime and data loss.

A DRaaS provider also continuously monitors the health of an organization’s primary and secondary environments to identify and address any discrepancies or potential issues promptly. DRaaS is also cost-efficient for organizations, with payment options ranging from traditional subscriptions to a pay-as-you-go model.

Now that you know how DRaaS works, and if you’re looking to implement it, you should look at options that suit your business requirements.

What are the different types of DRaaS?

DRaaS primarily comes in three varieties. Each type of DRaaS provides unique advantages, catering to organizations with varying levels of technical expertise and control preferences. Let’s drill into these options, what they offer and points to consider with each approach.

Self-service DRaaS

Self-service DRaaS is for tech-savvy organizations with in-house IT expertise that want complete control over their disaster recovery strategy. While it is the most cost-efficient and flexible option, you are entirely on your own when planning, testing and managing your disaster recovery strategies.

Assisted DRaaS

Assisted DRaaS is for organizations that want to strike a balance between user control and provider support. In this model, organizations share some disaster recovery responsibilities. Assisted DRaaS providers offer expertise in designing, planning and implementing disaster recovery strategies, helping organizations make informed decisions.

Managed DRaaS

Managed DRaaS is a fully outsourced solution where the service provider assumes end-to-end responsibility for the disaster recovery process, from planning and testing to executing the recovery plan and ongoing maintenance. It is an excellent choice for organizations that do not possess in-house IT expertise or prefer a hassle-free, turnkey solution.

What are the benefits of DRaaS?

A quality DRaaS solution brings many advantages and benefits to an organization’s data resilience. Here are a few ways in which organizations benefit most:

• Faster recovery: One of the most significant advantages of DRaaS is its ability to minimize downtime once a disaster strikes. With automated failover processes and third-party vendor facilities in place, DRaaS providers allow businesses to switch to a backup environment swiftly, keeping critical systems and applications running without disruption.
• Cost efficiency: DRaaS eliminates the need for upfront capital expenses for infrastructure and applications. It operates on a subscription-based or pay-as-you-go model, making it a cost-effective solution for businesses of all sizes.
• Resource optimization: DRaaS leverages cloud-based resource efficiency to reduce operational overhead and automate resource management, streamlining disaster recovery processes. Organizations leveraging DRaaS can optimize resource allocation, cut costs and focus on core business functions.
• Scalability: DRaaS solutions adapt to an organization’s specific needs, whether to protect a single application or the entire IT infrastructure, ensuring optimal flexibility and scalability.
• Streamlined compliance: DRaaS centralizes disaster recovery planning and execution, which helps streamline compliance. It also simplifies compliance reporting through automated documentation and audit trails.
• Enhanced security: DRaaS providers often employ robust encryption and security protocols to safeguard an organization’s data during backup and recovery processes, reducing the risk of data breaches.

Is DRaaS suitable for your organization?

While DRaaS is a versatile solution suitable for any organization committed to maintaining business continuity and data resilience, it is especially beneficial for smaller businesses with limited IT resources. It allows small businesses to get cost-effective and hassle-free disaster recovery solutions and ensure business continuity.

However, selecting the right DRaaS provider is crucial for organizations since offerings and costs vary. That’s why choosing the solution that best fits your business requirements is essential.

Key considerations when choosing a DRaaS solution

Every organization should assess its recovery objectives and align them with the capabilities of the DRaaS solution. Here are some of the factors that will help you make an informed decision when choosing the right DRaaS solution for your organization:

• Service level agreements (SLAs): You should scrutinize the SLAs to understand recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) offered by the provider. For instance, you should contemplate what happens to recovery times when the same natural disaster impacts both you and the DRaaS provider. You should also verify whether the provider can meet the recovery-time requirements of your critical applications.
• Responsibility and reliability: Before investing in the DRaaS solution, you should clearly understand the responsibilities between your organization and the DRaaS provider. Also, verify that the provider’s track record and reputation for reliability meet your organization’s expectations.
• Recovery testing: Recovery testing is a critical aspect of DRaaS, which involves regularly simulating disaster scenarios to evaluate the effectiveness of the recovery plan. By conducting recovery testing, organizations can identify potential weaknesses, refine their strategies and ensure that data and systems can be restored within acceptable timeframes. Assessing the DRaaS provider’s support for recovery testing is essential to ensure they deliver on their promises when disaster strikes.
• Recovery capacity: Determine the provider’s capability to handle your organization’s data and system recovery needs, especially if your infrastructure is extensive. Also, ensure scalability to accommodate your future growth.
• License structure and costs: Note the provider’s pricing model. Check whether it is subscription-based, pay-as-you-go or another structure, and evaluate whether it aligns with your budget and needs. Be aware of any hidden or additional costs.

Get DRaaS with IT Complete by Kaseya

Kaseya’s IT Complete offers DRaaS, which is integrated directly into our endpoint management solution, VSA, allowing you to streamline your disaster recovery strategy through a centralized console. With Kaseya’s DRaaS, you get round-the-clock uptime and the world’s best backup, ransomware protection, cloud-based storage and business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) services at minimal service delivery costs.

Here are some features of Kaseya’s DRaaS:

• Instant recovery
• Automated disaster recovery testing and RPO/RTO reports
• SLA Policy Automation
• Near continuous data protection
• Intuitive, centralized user interface
• Automatic ransomware protection
• Immutable cloud
• 24/7/365 support
• And many more

Learn more about DRaaS with IT Complete’s Unified Backup suite.

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In the event of a disruption, businesses must be able to quickly recover mission-critical data, restore IT systems and smoothly resume operations. A robust business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan is the key to having confidence in your ability to recover quickly with minimal disruption to the business.

What Is Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) and Why Is It Important for Businesses?

BCDR represents a set of approaches or processes that helps an organization recover from a disaster and resume its routine business operations. Disasters include natural calamities, outages or disruption due to power failure, employee negligence, hardware failure, or cyberattacks.

A BCDR plan ensures that businesses operate as close to normal as possible after an unexpected interruption, with minimal loss of data.

In the past, some companies were under the impression that only large enterprise organizations needed BCDR plans. However, it is just as critical for small and midsize businesses. The 2019 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report showed that “43 percent of [security] breaches involved small business victims.”

Having a proper BCDR plan in place enables businesses to minimize both the downtime and the cost of a disruption.

What Is the Difference Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?

The business continuity component of a BCDR plan deals with the people, processes and resources that are needed before, during and after an incident to minimize interruption of business operations and cost to the business. It includes:

• Team – The first and one of the most important components of a business continuity plan (BCP) is organizing a continuity team. Your BCP will be effective only if it is well-designed and if there is a dedicated team to execute it at a moment’s notice.
• Business Impact Analysis (BIA) – A deep analysis of potential threats and how they could impact the business — usually described in terms of cost to the business. The BIA identifies the most critical business functions that you need to protect and restore quickly.
• Resource Planning – Identifying resources (hardware systems, software, alternative office space and other items to be used during a crisis) as well as the key staff, and the roles they must play in the event of a disaster.

Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity planning and involves getting IT systems up and running following a disaster.

Planning for disaster recovery includes:

• Defining parameters for the company such as recovery time objective (RTO) — the maximum time systems can be down without causing significant damage to the business, and recovery point objective (RPO) — the amount of data that can be lost without affecting the business
• Implementing backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solutions and creating processes for restoring applications and data on all systems

What Are the Objectives of a BCDR Plan?

A BCDR plan aims to protect a company from financial loss in case of a disruptive event. Data losses and downtime can lead to businesses being shut down. A robust BCDR plan:

• Reduces the overall financial risk to the company
• Enables the company to comply with industry regulations with regards to data management
• Prepares the organization to respond adequately and resume operations as quickly as possible in the aftermath of a crisis

6 Steps to Execute a Robust BCDR Plan

1. Identify the team: The continuity team will not only carry out the business continuity plan in the event of a crisis but will also ensure that your other employees are informed and know how to respond in a crisis. The team will also be responsible for planning and executing crisis communications strategies.
2. Conduct a business impact analysis (BIA): A BIA identifies the impact of a sudden loss of business functions, usually in terms of cost to the business. It also identifies the most critical business functions, which allows you to create a business continuity plan that prioritizes recovery of these essential functions.
3. Design the recovery plan: Determine acceptable downtime for critical systems and implement backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solutions for those critical systems as well as SaaS application data. BDR solutions can be appliance-based or in the cloud. Consider Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solutions as part of your overall strategy.
4. Test your backups: Disaster recovery testing is a vital part of a backup and recovery plan. Without proper testing, you will never know if your backup can be recovered. According to the 2019 State of IT Operations Survey Report, only 31 percent of the respondents test their disaster recovery plan regularly, which shows that businesses usually underestimate the importance of BDR testing.
5. Execute the plan: In the event of a disruption, execute the processes that get your systems and business back to normal.
6. Measure, review and keep the plan updated: Measure the success of your execution and update your plan based on any gaps that are uncovered. Testing the BCDR plan beforehand is recommended for better results.

Learn more about BCDR planning and its importance to successful business operations by downloading our eBook Business Continuity Planning to Combat a Crisis.

The post What is BCDR? Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Explained appeared first on Kaseya.

Let’s take a look at why disaster recovery fails and how you can avoid the factors that lead to this failure:

1. Failure to Identify and Understand Recovery Dependencies

Disaster recovery plans often include backup and data retention strategies that do not thoroughly map the dependencies and requirements needed for smooth disaster recovery. Failing to align backup plans with specific restore expectations can have devastating consequences.

Restoring Server Operations Only the Beginning

For business operations running on multi-tier or N-tier applications, simply restoring server operation is not enough. In these environments, processing, data management, and presentation functions may be hosted on different machines that all need to communicate with one another perfectly. If you back up these components on different schedules or restore them with the wrong boot order or to a host with a different virtual network, the communication between them may be lost. As a result, disaster recovery will fail, data may be lost, and you may waste many hours troubleshooting the issues.

Configuration Issues

Configuration issues in the production environment can jeopardize your disaster recovery. For example, when configuring virtual server environments as backup targets, you need to allocate space for snapshots so they can be properly executed and saved.

Tips for Identifying Critical Dependencies and Ensuring Successful Recoveries:

• Brainstorm on a variety of downtime scenarios and walk through specific steps you will need to follow to restore service to end users. Examine each step in the process for potential dependencies or barriers to disaster recovery.
• Document critical dependencies – boot orders, application requirements, etc. and incorporate them in the recovery steps.

2. Understanding and Avoiding Software Compatibility Issues

There are a wide range of software compatibility issues that can render data unrecoverable. Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) is a common source of compatibility issues. However, new backup and cloud disaster recovery technologies are integrating advanced self-healing software to solve software compatibility. This technology automatically detects VSS compatibility issues, misconfigurations and a wide range of threats to recoverability. The software mediates VSS conflicts, restarts backups and performs a variety of other steps to remediate backup issues before they threaten recovery, without requiring any intervention by your IT team.

3. Inadequate Testing

IT teams continue to struggle to find the time and resources to perform disaster recovery testing frequently enough to ensure recoveries will happen as planned. However, testing backups is essential for smooth recovery. A solid disaster recovery plan should avoid shortcuts such as testing only annually (or not at all), pre-loading tapes in tape libraries, pre-staging servers and substituting spot-checking for full testing of restores.

Tips for Improved Testing:

• Implement advanced backup and cloud recovery solutions that will automatically conduct complete recovery testing of your backup environment.
• Invest in backup and recovery solutions that will automatically test recoverability of applications and document actual disaster recovery time and recovery point.

4. Failure to Protect Against Data Corruption and Malware

There are myriad causes of corruption of backup data that can cause recoveries to fail – from solar flare bit flipping to unexpected power outages to XFS and filesystem issues to various hardware failures (issues with RAID controllers, storage controllers, file system corruption, NAS failures, etc.).

Despite the growing frequency of headline-grabbing incidents, failing to detect malware in backup environments continues to be among the most common issues causing disaster recovery failures. Ransomware creators have become increasingly sophisticated – creating programs that lie dormant long enough to be included in data backups, eliminating the ability to defend against attacks with a simple recovery of the latest data.

Tips for Avoiding Data Corruption and Malware Infection in Your Backups:

• Choose a backup and recovery technology that is Linux-based. Most malware infections target Windows-based systems.
• Ensure your backup and recovery technology can detect early warning signs of malware infection.
• Use a backup and recovery solution that automatically spins up and tests recoverability of applications in your backup environment to ensure you can safely recover with uninfected backups in the event of a ransomware (or other malware) attack.
• Ensure your backup solution has integrated cyclic redundancy checking (CRC). CRC is an error-detecting code used to detect accidental changes to blocks of data entering your backup system to ensure there is no data corruption.

5. Failure to Follow Media Management Best Practices

One of the most common reasons why a seemingly perfect backup cannot be recovered is due to the mishandling of backup or archive media – tapes, removable hard drives, etc. While tape and removable disk media are relatively low-tech, they are highly manual and require disciplined adherence to best practices. Simple human errors, such as mislabeling tape or archive drives, can make recovery from these media impossible.

For efficient data backup, you can automate the entire process of managing backup, off-site replication and long-term retention. You could also choose to use disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS).

Today’s leading appliances also come with self-healing hardware and remote monitoring that detect early warning signs of hardware issues and automatically schedule servicing before an actual failure occurs.

Today’s IT infrastructures are increasingly complex combinations of on-premises, SaaS, cloud and virtual environments. For efficient backup and recovery, consider a backup solution that integrates with your endpoint management solution. Monitor and manage all of your endpoints, and manage AV/AM deployments and backups, all from a single console.

Kaseya Unified Backup brings together the world’s best backup, ransomware protection, cloud-based storage and business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) services in a powerful, all-in-one appliance-based platform. To learn more about Kaseya Unified Backup, download our product brief here.

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