The benefits of a public-cloud based DRaaS deployment
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- Published: Tuesday, 02 August 2016 08:22
By Lynn LeBlanc.
As IT becomes ever more mission critical and technical teams are stretched to the limit, one outage could be all it takes to destroy a successful company. And it happens more often than you might think. Operating without a solid business resiliency plan is like skydiving without a parachute.
Many companies don’t have the cash, resources, or time available to create a working business continuity strategy that relies on a secondary physical data site or outsourced provider. However, by leveraging disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) that is designed to work with a public cloud, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), organizations have the potential to change the game and provide the safety net needed by today’s IT-centric business operations.
Below are three advantages that a modern DRaaS solution that leverages the public cloud can bring, making effective business resiliency easier to achieve for your team:
1. Your budget will love DRaaS
You already know that the public cloud economic model can be very attractive since capital expenditures are eliminated; you only pay for what you use; and resources can be scaled on-demand. For all of these reasons, the public cloud is completely altering the business continuity and disaster recovery landscape, creating the potential for low-cost business resiliency for companies of every size. Business continuity and disaster recovery inherently involves a secondary site, and the public cloud financial model makes this a dramatically more cost-effective option than creating a mirrored environment in a colocation facility or other traditional approach. Whether your capacity requirements or IT budget grow or shrink, the public cloud allows you to right-size your business continuity and disaster recovery solutions without breaking the bank.
Beneficial DRaaS solutions include backup, replication, disaster recovery and business continuity, all leveraging the public cloud. They’ll keep your business running and quickly restore operations if your primary site isn’t available, while providing the public cloud’s sophistication, scale and low price points.
Be sure to watch out for backup-only or traditional business continuity and disaster recovery providers that re-label limited or old-school offerings as DRaaS.
2. You can custom-fit DRaaS to meet changing business requirements
No two IT shops have the exact same business continuity and disaster recovery needs. Public cloud-based DRaaS lets companies easily customize their business resiliency solution to include the optimal features to support their individual needs. Those capabilities can also adjust as your company’s requirements change over time. This customization is possible because a DRaaS offering that leverages the public cloud lets your company modify capabilities on demand, right-size the environment, run workloads as long as they’re needed and migrate back on premise automatically. In the event of an outage, this automation and flexibility is critical. Since DRaaS solutions utilize public cloud infrastructure, they can effectively scale plus avoid any broad-based regional outages. An additional consideration is the degree of integration with your current operating environment: the tighter the integration, the easier the ongoing management.
3. Extensive support for your business resiliency team
Not every operations team has the specialized skills required to implement an effective business continuity and disaster recovery plan, deploy a hybrid on- and off-premise solution, test on an ongoing basis, and maintain the environment over time. That’s why one of the most valuable components of a DRaaS solution is the partner you work with: the right one can help plan and implement your business continuity environment in an economic and efficient manner. Your partner might also offer additional services, such as monitoring and automated testing, and provide your team with additional skillsets to make the deployment an ongoing success. As a result, you’ll be confident that all of your workloads will be continuously protected and any necessary recovery process will be a smooth one.
Conclusion
Disasters aren’t limited to floods and tornadoes; IT disasters happen every day. Whether one takes the form of a security breach, networking failure, software bug or human error, DRaaS puts business resiliency within reach of every organization. So many IT managers live in fear of unexpected downtime, and the public cloud provides new options that fit virtually any environment and budget. DRaaS based in the public cloud is a perfect fit for today’s rapidly evolving data centers / centres, and offers an ideal alternative for any IT shop seeking to avoid the cost and complexity of traditional business continuity and disaster recovery. DRaaS can help every company tackle the need for always-on business continuity, and there’s no time like the present to get started.
The author
Lynn LeBlanc, CEO and founder of HotLink Corporation, has more than 25 years of enterprise software and technology experience at both Fortune 500 companies and Silicon Valley start-ups. Prior to founding HotLink, LeBlanc was founder and CEO of FastScale Technology, an enterprise software company acquired by VMware, Inc.
