Losing business critical data can cost companies millions of dollars and force some companies to go out of business, which is why having a solid disaster recovery plan in place is critical to your business. IT decision makers are left with a complex quandary: do you create your own in house solutions or to go with a DRaaS solution? In this blog we will help to simplify this decision by going through some of the differences as well as the pros and cons of both options.
Traditional Disaster Recovery (DR)
Traditional DR is when a company owns and operates their own disaster recovery strategy. This typically involves:
- protecting data through tape backup and/or imaging, or
- replicating their production environment to an onsite DR hub
Both of these come with a number of best practices that will have to be followed by their IT team, however, organizations normally lean more towards a more traditional DR approach because they do not feel comfortable with having their data stored externally. Key problems with the traditional approach is the fact that it hinders RTOs and RPOs, involves hidden costs which accrue quickly and is a very timely process.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is a cloud-based offering that replicates and hosts your applications and business critical data to Virtual Machines (VMs). Your third-party vendor creates snapshots/instances of your data either on timed or scheduled intervals and then stores this information on a cloud, which can then be loaded back on to your machine in the event of a disaster (i.e. file deletion, malicious ransomware attacks, etc.). As long as there are no major network issues as a result of your disaster, you can recover your data fairly quickly to minimize down time. DRaaS also offers substantial cost savings organizations don’t have to invest in the infrastructure or resources required to manage their backup solutions.
The key take away is that your company makes the right decision that fits your specific business needs. Ready to learn more about how cloud backup helps IT professionals proactively protect themselves from unforeseen disasters?