Co-founder and Vice President/General Manager of ZertoResponsible for driving the direction and vision of the company.
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While many enterprise-sized companies have adopted the cloud in one way or another, other small to medium-sized enterprises have yet to make the leap. They understand the economic rationale for moving to the cloud, such as trading capital expenditures versus operating expenses. But many of these organizations lack the resources and skill sets to navigate this migration.
Instead, they dip their toes into the cloud via cloud-based services such as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), which provide a means to failover and restore entire applications or sites using a secure, managed cloud as the target location.
Companies can build and maintain their own in-house secondary website. But this approach can be costly, forcing them to use part of their funding to build an entire data center, hire people to run it and pay to keep it cool. Instead, they can offset the cloud provider’s financial liability, allowing them to pay for only what they need in computing power or storage.
Building a data center to host disaster recovery (DR) applications is like buying a car to go on a road trip once a year. Companies can offset costs with a mixed cloud of public and private clouds, but they still need to help protect their data.
An organization moving DR to the cloud is a good start. However, few of them would run full production in the cloud if they hadn’t done so before. And it can be expensive to develop a hybrid cloud to run only DR.
Cost arguments aside, the issue of experience is what drives organizations to adopt DRaaS. Ransomware attacks continue to paralyze organizations around the world. according to IDCOver a third of organizations in the world have been targeted by a ransomware attack.
Many organizations say they are uncomfortable with the sole responsibility to protect their data, saying they lack the skill set, resources, and time to adequately defend against ransomware attacks. According to IDC, more than 40% of companies surveyed in a recent study They stated that they lacked the IT knowledge and skills to manage the DR.
As a result, tThe DRaaS market has grown by 40% year-on-year As more and more organizations seek to reduce the costs of capital expenditures and protect against ransomware or other outages caused by natural, man-made disturbances.
DRaaS provides a turnkey cloud data protection solution that takes on the hard work and provides the expertise to run and protect data and applications in the cloud. Organizations that choose DRaaS over their own cloud development to run DR do not have to worry about providing maintenance and support, developing network and firewall infrastructure, purchasing storage and forecasting capacity and scheduling downtime to run tests.
DRaaS providers help companies bring DR back to the cloud by taking over all of the core business. Most DR organizations will offer services via software exclusively, saving money for physical servers and storage. They provide data centers close to client operations for faster performance. They adhere to service level agreements (SLAs) that define recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTO) standards.
Most DRaaS services come in two different offerings: self-service and fully managed. Self-Service DRaaS is a prepackaged offering with a third party site for replication and full responsibility for customer data and applications. This approach is ideal for companies that are transitioning to a pay-as-you-go model to reduce the impact of their data center while retaining a certain level of control.
The service provider typically offers a fully managed DRaaS with either a public or private cloud. Their services are backed by strict service level agreements maintained by professionals with deep DR backgrounds. All DR cloud design, installation, and maintenance is the responsibility of the provider. This approach is usually better suited to companies that lack technical personnel but require high security requirements.
There are many DRaaS providers in the market. When evaluating them, organizations should look for a solution:
• It offers a non-disrupting solution, so operations are not interrupted during setup and continuous testing.
• It provides fast, near-synchronous replication and is hardware and software neutral.
• Allows workloads to move to the cloud with the fewest number of barriers.
• It consists of only a software solution that can suit the needs of the client.
• Ensures a clear cost advantage over on-site private cloud development.
Businesses and people have been working in the cloud for years without really thinking about it – whether it’s streaming personal content or office applications. Most of these experiences are taken for granted. But when it comes to protecting data and applications from ransomware and other threats, then organizations will have to understand the specifics of their DRaaS services. This experience may or may not make them more likely to embrace the cloud more.
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