IT outage has been one of the key issues that modern IT infrastructure still considers on, with constant technology innovation and deployment we see a decline in the outage. In the past two years, 93 percent of the organizations have experienced tech-related business disruption, and out every five enterprises, one of them have experienced major reputational damage and complete loss for many of the customers. From malicious cyber-attacks to natural disasters, enterprises are facing a myriad of security threats due to business continuity that impacts the complete business productivity, property, and reputations.  Disaster Recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) is a cloud-based service provided by the cloud service providers that assist in protecting against outages through infrastructure and strategy that deals with all the security risks.  One of the major benefits of Cloud DRaaS over an on-premise disaster recovery is the complete recovery of the infrastructure investment and run parallel systems as the Backup. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offers improved protection against threats as the infrastructure is at a remote location, and the physical infrastructure that is meant to be protected is not present. With the added option of scalability as the business improves will assist the business to grow and offers higher native availability. A recovery cloud infrastructure should be well documented and offer protection against all the present security threats. For successful data recovery option depends on the cloud service provider (CSP) options, with easy availability, it assists the businesses to grow with meeting their complete business objective. Here are certain points every enterprise should consider before adopting a certain Cloud Service Provider (CSP) that completely fits your business needs.

Objectives that organizations should consider when choosing the DRaaS Cloud Service Provider (CSP)

A business that looks for a disaster recovery solution provider they are set to trust them with data and critical business operations that should be successfully migrated during the worst case business scenarios. So the decision makers and IT teams should be clear with capabilities and create a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that will deliver. The planning will include weighting costs as part of the budget requirement and reviewing regulatory and compliance factors.  With cloud services offering complete solutions but the flexibility of operating that will mean the user will have to pay only for what they consume, that is more preferred over the on-premise environment that is brought and cost revenue but only occasionally used. Cloud Service Providers (CSP) pricing models can be complicated making it imperative for the enterprises to define the objective and complete implications to be fully failover during the production environment to the cloud. The CSP should satisfy the size of environment accurately that can provide sufficient storage and resources before it could lead to undaunted events during the emergency resulting in failover. It can result in more transparent pricing issues so that a user can be clear to the true pricing costs for your business continuity program.

During the disaster scenario the enterprise IT teams are over-stretched and under a load of pressure to deal with different scenarios, so IT teams have to decide on whether the Disaster Recovery solution chosen will be of similar environment based on the structure and terminology.  Many of the IT admins today are familiar with VMware based cloud product that uses the same type of toolsets and terminology assisting in reducing the learning curve, making it easier to respond during a disaster. It’s very imperative that enterprises that are using the Disaster Recovery will need to set a limit for the DIY exercise and how much support during a complete disaster or failure of the infrastructure you can expect from a CSP.  It will be one of the leading factors that can assist the enterprises during the onboarding scenarios, with a need for the complete scope of internal resources or additional consultancy that will need to manage the complete setup. Support from the CSP is one issue that needs to be sorted before the applications are adopted and will assist before the falling back time comes.

Management is another critical factor that can benefit from cloud DRaaS is that in-house IT teams don’t have to approach a second on-premise environment to manage. The environment should be replicated that can be solved by without adding burdens for the on-premise environment to manage. The complete DR environment is essential and needs to be simpler, how can your team manage the DR environment and what tools will be required to manage the troubleshooting issues.  Management should be intuitive, but in certain cases, the IT team might need training or resources to deal with DR management. Compliance with local, industry and client regulations is one issue that enterprises have to deal dynamically. Is the complete backup environment compliant with industry regulations to prevent the data vulnerabilities that can compromise the customer’s critical data and your business? The DR provider should be compliant with all the regulations to prevent any escalation of data security issues.

Automation in DRaaS

Disaster Recovery solutions provider has the infrastructure and technology to test the DR plans without impacting the production environment. However, many CSP has added that organizations are usually reluctant to test their DR plans.  Using the cloud DRaaS, enterprises are all set to run the recovery tests in different environments in a very short time, generating a complete detailed report about the performance of every part of the DR plan and recovery scenario. It tests a complete scenario during a disaster that gives an overview during a disaster and will the complete application recover during the disaster.  Testing the complete DR environment gives the user a view about the recovery solutions that assist the business during an actual disaster, how the system reacts during such sessions.

Conclusion

Enterprises are objectively attacking the disaster recovery solutions as it’s the replica of the original environment with reduced infrastructure costs to handle. With a complete on-demand recovery solution at your fingertips business can support on-demand security testing, system upgrade, patch testing, and user acceptance testing without disrupting their production environment. Having a CSP based Disaster recovery solution in place will assist the businesses in finding the confidence to deal with remote location business.

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