DRaaS: Taking a Service Driven Approach to Disaster Recovery

Gartner predicts that from 2016 through 2020, the use of eitherDRaaS or IaaS to support the failover of production applications will grow bymore than 200%. That's a lot of DR data, but DR is nothing new so whythe change to a service driven approach?

Why DRaaS?

The accelerating speed of business, the ever-present budgetary crunch inIT (do more with less and less), and the advent of the cloud all arecontributing factors here. The disruptive nature of cloud and virtualization andthe increased variety, volume and value of data sets have all necessitated achange in the approach to disaster recovery.

Even the nature of disasters themselves have evolved.  No longer are we just planning for the epic data centre is a crater situation, but more often than not we're working to ensure recovery from smaller scale catastrophes.  Database corruption, malware, ransomware, system crash  OH MY!  95 percent of stuff might be unaffected by whatever is happening, but holy moly that last five percent is what brings in the bacon! Better have a plan that scales to cover the micro and macro disasters.

Where do you DRaaS?

A survey of our own cloud users showed that a growing percentage of themare shifting their disaster recovery strategies to leverage the elastic resourcesavailable in the cloud. It's not just about backup anymore!

There's good reason for this change in perception, too. The cloudis over a decade old now and has reached a maturity in the market such thatthere is a solid element of trust for that technology. Another reason isthe speed at which you can stand up and tear down environments. Gone are thedays of having to buy 2X of everything to ensure there was an exact mirror copyof all your big iron. Store your DR data in the cloud, recover it in thecloud, pay for the systems you need and not the just in case duplicate arraysitting hours away. The economies here make sense.

Who do you DRaaS with?

I'm sitting here writing this blog thinking that disaster recovery is still one of the things companies gamble the most with. They know they need it, but the value is only realized when a disaster occurs (like insurance), and boy are you happy it's there! The biggest challenges have always been:

• Do you have a DR plan? Seriously, just start figuring out what you need to keep the business alive if all else fails.
• Do you regularly test this DR plan? Avoid pitfalls and make sure your plan actually works!
• Is it automated? If step 8 is Bob pushes the blue button then you're in trouble. What if Bob's on vacation?  What if Bob can't physically get to the blue button to push it?

These reasons are why I still see organizations today that don't have even the first item covered. It's too complex! Too hard to figure out! Too expensive! This is where DRaaS truly makes sense. CDW's DRaaS (powered by Commvault) takes care of helping you to develop that plan, ensure it's regularly tested to validate and provide the automation to streamline the overall operations. Take advantage of your choice in cloud and work with consultants who have done this before successfully.