DRaaS stands for “Disaster Recovery as a Service” which is a service model to protect and backup data in the cloud computing environment against disasters. Disasters may include equipment failures, power outages, cyberattacks, and natural disasters, such as floods, hurricanes, fires, and earthquakes. DRaaS is very important for business continuity, outages can cost thousands of dollars per minute to organizations.
DRaaS solutions aim to restore the data as close as they can to its latest state. Most recovery time objectives are within 4 hours and recover the data by bringing up machines in another location. DRaaS solutions switch automatically to live mirrored servers in another geographical location to restore and avoid the effects of the disaster.
There are three types of DRaaS: Managed DRaaS, Assisted DRaaS, and Self-Service DRaaS.
In managed DRaaS, a third party takes care of disaster recovery. Organizations that lack the required expertise to manage their own disaster recovery can choose this option and make sure that their DRaaS providers it up to date on all infrastructure, application, and service changes.
In assisted DRaaS, the third part and the organization share the responsibility. It is ideal for organizations that have a unique or customized application that might be too complicated for the third part to handle.
The self-service DRaaS is the most affordable solution. The organization is responsible for planning, testing, and management. The third party is only responsible for hosting its infrastructure backup in a remote location.