Disaster Recovery
How DRaaS (Disaster Recovery As A Service) Helps Eliminate Unplanned Downtime
Today, business no longer operates on a 9-to-5 schedule. Now, customers expect access to their accounts and resources around the clock. Employees want access to internal systems from anywhere in the world, at any time of day.
In a 9-to-5 business world, companies could afford to shut down for a day or 2 after a server crash, while systems are brought back online. But today, unplanned downtime comes with much more serious consequences, and should preferably be avoided at all costs.
Of course, it’s impossible to prevent a system outage. Software bugs, viruses, hardware problems, manual errors, and even natural disasters can bring a company’s IT systems to a sudden halt. And there isn’t very much that IT administrators can do to provide 100% protection against these unexpected events.
However, there are some efficient and inexpensive ways to avert the costly consequences of unplanned downtime. With a cloud-based disaster recovery solution, companies have a cost-effective way to ensure that critical systems can be brought back online promptly… with little or no noticeable downtime.
Disaster-recovery-as-a-service, or DRaaS, allows small businesses with limited IT resources to access the same kinds of business continuity measures that are in use at major Fortune 500 companies, but without the significant investments in hardware, licensing, and staffing.
DRaaS helps prevent unplanned downtime using several different approaches.
One common method relies on the use of a local backup appliance that connects to a remote cloud data center. Backups are performed frequently to the local backup appliance, and then these changes are transferred to the cloud data center.
In the event of a disaster, backups can be quickly transferred over to the main server from this local appliance. If the main server is physically destroyed or otherwise incapacitated, a temporary recovery server can quickly be mounted on the local appliance using the most appropriate backup copy. And in events — such as natural disasters — where both the primary server and the DR appliance are unavailable, then systems can be spun up in the cloud as a temporary center of operations until the primary servers can be rebuilt.
For optimal business continuity, primary servers can also be mirrored to the cloud and continuously monitored. If primary systems go down, operations can quickly “failover” to the cloud provider’s data center until these servers can be brought back.