What Is DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service)? Definition, Working, and Examples
DRaaS refers to a service model that offers backup services to help organizations withstand unplanned outages.
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is defined as a cloud-based service model used by organizations to back up their IT infrastructure onto a third-party cloud environment, providing disaster recovery solutions for IT-enabled systems subject to disasters. This article explains how DRaaS works, along with some of its key examples.
Table of Contents
What Is DRaaS?
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) refers to a cloud-based service model used by organizations to back up their IT infrastructure onto a third-party cloud environment, providing disaster recovery solutions for IT-enabled systems that are subject to disasters. DRaaS enables enterprises to regain control over the IT fabric’s functionality when a disaster of some kind hits it.
This ‘as-a-service’ business model implies that the cloud service provider is entirely responsible for the disaster recovery management of an organization. As such, companies do not have to deploy their own resources while recovering from uncertain events.
Common disasters that have impacted IT organizations heavily include cyberattacks; system failures; power cuts; natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and wildfires; and many more. Although such events are inevitable, disaster recovery solutions can be crucial for business continuity.
DRaaS models tend to copy an IT ecosystem’s compute, storage, and networking functions onto virtual servers hosted by a service provider’s cloud or hybrid environment. Such an arrangement allows organizations to run their applications on a third party’s infrastructure rather than waiting for the disaster-affected physical servers to be fixed. As a result, business operations can go on uninterrupted while ensuring faster disaster recovery times and instantaneous troubleshooting of problems.
Upon the recovery of physical systems, data and computing processes are migrated back to the original IT frameworks. Although customers may experience higher latency in their daily activities while accessing a service provider’s cloud instead of their local server, the overall business cost of system downtime can be much more significant to bear. Hence, enterprises need a recovery plan to keep their everyday businesses up and running even after being hit by a disaster. Depending on their requirements and budget, organizations can purchase DRaaS services from third-party vendors through a subscription or pay-per-use model.
Types of DRaaS models
The global DRaaS market is dominated by Amazon (AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery), IBM Corporation, Microsoft (Microsoft Azure Site Recovery), VMWare, Zerto, and others. Typically, organizations give control of all or part of their disaster recovery plans to such top-rated DRaaS providers. Depending on the SLA (service-level agreement), DRaaS providers employ the following deployment models to render services:
- Managed DRaaS: In a managed DRaaS model, the entire responsibility of disaster recovery is handed over to the service provider. This model is suitable for companies that lack the necessary expertise to handle unanticipated events.
- Assisted DRaaS: In assisted DRaaS, only some aspects of the disaster recovery plan are handed over to third-party vendors. The remaining is controlled by the organization itself or by its customers.
- Self-service DRaaS: In self-service DRaaS models, the organization or customers themselves plan, test, implement, and manage disaster recovery strategies by hosting backups on virtual systems that are remotely located. This is the least expensive DRaaS model and is suitable for companies with the necessary expertise.
Benefits of DRaaS
DRaaS is beneficial for any organization that relies on IT-based business systems. These are the key benefits of DRaaS:
- Faster recovery: DRaaS allows businesses to function normally while restoring the disaster-hit components and services quickly (hours, minutes) based on the SLA.
- Affordable solution: DRaaS provides organizations with a cost-effective solution to protect themselves from the consequences of IT downtime.
- Expert recovery: IT teams find it challenging to research, test, and validate various disaster recovery plans as they lack the necessary expertise. With DRaaS, the burden of planning for disaster recovery is put into the hands of eligible experts.
- Resource optimization: As DRaaS is a cloud-based service, it offers an elastic usage model, wherein customers can only pay for what is consumed (pay-per-use model). This is in contrast to traditionally available customer-operated disaster recovery data centers, where the cost needs to be paid upfront.
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How DRaaS Processes Work
DRaaS facilitates backup and recovery, real-time data replication, and complete or in-part data protection. Typically, DRaaS models provide services in premise-to-cloud and cloud-to-cloud settings.
DRaaS clouds can be private, public, or hybrid and serve small, medium, and large enterprises. DRaaS is key to various industries, from the financial sector, such as banks, government agencies, IT, telecom, and media & entertainment, to the manufacturing and logistics sectors. While DRaaS has multiple applications across diverse fields, its workflow remains the same.
Now let’s understand the key phases involved in working with the DRaaS model that decide the scope and cost of the DRaaS process.
1. Replication
In this phase, stateful snapshots of applications requiring protection are taken at a rate that matches an organization’s RPO (recovery point objectives) requirements, wherein RPO refers to the period the company can bear data loss during a disaster event. The captured snapshots are then replicated on DRaaS data centers, which store all the snapshots in a first-in-first-out (FIFO) manner. Some DRaaS providers also offer automatic snapshotting as a part of a ‘zero data loss’ policy.
2. Failover
In this phase, after the disaster event, user access to data and applications is shifted from on-site servers to DRaaS data centers where replicated snapshot instances are present. With failover, applications can continue to run despite network downtime until operations are finally restored.
3. Failback
Failback is the final phase of a disaster recovery plan. Once the disaster event has been tackled, user access is shifted back to the original on-site servers or data centers. On completing this phase, the system resets its three-phase process in preparation for the next disaster.
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Examples of DRaaS
With the exponential rise in data across industry sectors, the need to back up public and private data has become essential. It has been observed that unplanned outages in the corporate world have contributed significantly to data loss. As a result, companies sometimes suffer irreparable damages resulting in an ultimate shutdown.
However, backup services can be helpful in such cases as they secure companies from unexpected disasters. Backed by this fact, the DRaaS market has recently exhibited considerable growth. According to a March 2022 report by ReportLinker, the global DRaaS market accounted for $5.79 billion in 2021 and is expected to surge ahead and reach $26.73 billion by the end of 2026.
With the digital transformation of companies, there has been a notable upsurge in cyber threats. Organizations are also wary of potential data breaches that can compromise their sensitive data. Companies rely on AI- and machine learning-based DRaaS solutions to handle external threats and enable faster recovery. Such learning algorithms proactively detect outages and eliminate them before they can damage the company’s business operations. Unitrends is an example of a US-based firm that offers AI-based backup services for companies impacted by ransomware attacks.
Some of the common real-life examples where DRaaS can help restore data and applications are:
1. DDoS attacks
Let’s consider a disaster recovery example where cybercriminals launch a DDoS (Distributed-Denial-of-Service) attack on an organization. In such an attack, a network is bombarded with illegitimate requests to remain occupied and may even block legitimate data from entering the network. As a result, connecting to network databases becomes a challenging task.
A recent example of DDoS attacks points to the ones that Russian hackers executed in March 2022 on Ukrainian government websites just before invading the country. In such a scenario, it is vital to have a backup plan to ensure that routine operations are not interrupted. One way to approach this would be to maintain backup data server images and design virtual servers in the cloud depending on the images or need. The process may not be seamless at times, but having the data backup and images can help restore the network.
2. Damaged data centers
Data centers can be permanently damaged due to natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, wildfires, and network outages. For example, recent events such as hurricane Sandy, the wildfires in California, and also power grid outages in Texas reveal the importance of backup and recovery services. Such disasters tend to destroy all or a part of a data center, including servers, disks, and other hardware components. Due to climate change, such events are becoming increasingly common these days.
The solution to such problems that businesses can implement include keeping offsite copies of data, maintaining data backups at remote data centers, and even keeping a copy of records on clouds in different regions. Moreover, moving data quickly to other infrastructure is equally crucial since restoring data backup over the internet can be time-consuming. In summary, it is inevitable to keep the offsite copies of data and design a methodology to restore data onto a new framework quickly.
3. Data tampering
In this type of disaster event, hackers insert malicious codes into a company’s sensitive data so that the business data eventually becomes unusable. Such codes can also spread malware across the systems in the network.
You can prepare for such a scenario by backing up the essential copies of data that allow you to recover the necessary versions of the data that are crucial to maintaining business continuity. Taking multiple data backups at different time instances (daily, weekly, monthly) can help the cause. Rather than deleting older copies, it is essential to keep them intact so that several backups aid in faster recovery. Moreover, if you know which data was sabotaged, you can perform recovery operations only on damaged data parts while keeping clean data as is.
4. Ransomware attacks
Apart from the above examples, several companies have been hit by ransomware attacks recently. According to an October 2021 report by Coveware, typical ransomware caused an average downtime of around 20 days in the fourth quarter of 2021. In 2022, Connectwise published another such study that showed how ransomware affected at least two out of three mid-sized companies in the past one and half years.
On May 7, 2021, Colonial Pipeline Company reported one ransomware case where the company was forced to shut down its pipeline system in response to the attack. Although operations were restored on May 13, 2022, due to immediate recovery plans, this proves that DR planning is a must for organizations.
Companies such as VMWare are taking steps to put DR plans in place. In July 2020, VMWare acquired Datrium keeping in mind its DRaaS objectives. With this acquisition, the company has widened its DRaaS scope and reduced the chances of disrupting its business post a disaster. Moreover, COVID-19 has accelerated digitization, further propelling the adoption of DRaaS.
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Takeaway
The modern IT world demands that organizations have proper disaster recovery plans to tackle the consequences of unknown disaster events. Moreover, with sophistication in technology and the increased adoption of the cloud by organizations, the risks of cyberattacks have increased alarmingly. A well-sorted disaster recovery solution can help recovery teams and companies secure their data and streamline business operations.
Successful recovery strategies should be easy to implement, reliable, and budget-friendly. Such DR solutions ensure that companies of all sizes can avail of various DRaaS services, thereby maintaining business continuity even in the most testing times.
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