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5 Reasons Why Disaster Recovery as a Service is a Smart Idea

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If you check out the numbers , it’s clear that businesses with solid Disaster Recovery plans will be back on their feet within hours or days following an event, while the majority of those without DR plans — too often smaller businesses — won’t recover at all.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Cloud computing: The Gateway to Disaster Recovery Risk Management

In an IDG market survey conducted about a year ago it was reported that 43% of respondents had taken their first steps toward a hybrid cloud to improve their Disaster Recovery capabilities.

The trend has caught on – these days, it’s called Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), and you’ll be hearing a lot more about it as threats to the availability, safety, and security of data, applications, and systems intensify. For smaller enterprises, discussions about how to apply the principles of Disaster Recovery Risk Management and Disaster Recovery planning will increasingly focus on DRaaS.

5 good reasons for DRaaS
  1. DRaaS alleviates the hassles of Disaster Recovery planning . Before the advent of the Cloud, a traditional DR plan was complex, time-consuming, and costly to deploy and manage. DRaaS, on the other hand, requires no hardware and you don’t need to build, staff, manage, and maintain a secondary data center. DRaaS processes are automated and secure. The right DRaaS provider can offer you strategic advice and tactical help in both Disaster Recovery Risk Management and Disaster Recovery planning.
  2. Reduced DRaaS costs mean fewer security tradeoffs. You no longer need to leave your organization vulnerable because you can’t afford adequate protection (for, say, satellite offices). Compared to traditional, in-house DR and many managed services alternatives, DRaaS-based replication, failover, and recovery cost significantly less. Why? Because DRaaS can be custom-configured and custom-scaled to accommodate your changing requirements on-demand, so you pay only for what you need. No wonder Forrester Research found, in a 2014 study that 61% of those surveyed opted for cloud data protection and storage to save money.
  3. A single DRaaS interface and management environment eases ongoing DR monitoring and maintenance burdens, and makes for easier staff training.
  4. DRaaS self-service capabilities give you 24×7 control, making it easier to test your DR plan, recover your data and systems, establish virtual machine failover and failback workflows, and set custom recovery objectives (RPO/RTO).
  5. The right DRaaS solution consolidates your IT infrastructure, enabling you to turn your data center, hybrid cloud , and Disaster Recovery plans into a more streamlined and secure IT environment.

In my next post, I’ll lay out some of the criteria you should be using to evaluate potential DRaaS providers.

Meet the Author
Tim Burke is the President and CEO of Quest. He has been at the helm for over 30 years.
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