November 21, 2017

If you associate disaster recovery with stress and chaos, you’ve probably wanted to hand it all off to someone else at some point. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) can sound pretty appealing that way – experts step in with advanced technology and deep BDR experience to protect your assets while your team gets back to more interesting, meaningful work.

The benefits of DRaaS are obvious at a glance. It can be more cost-effective than building additional data centers and equipping them with servers, storage and staff, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. You don’t need to worry about lost or untested backups, or a fire taking out your servers. Virtualization can reduce storage requirements through deduplication and compression. The right provider can dedicate the best technology and skills in the BDR world to protecting your data.

This can be a relief, when you can’t hit the RTOs your leaders and customers demand, or when an outage leads to a drop in employee morale and the confidence of your partners. It can seem like the perfect answer when you know you aren’t ready for that next big disaster. But does that mean DRaaS is right for you?

Here are 5 signs your team can benefit from DRaaS.

Your team spends too much time on laborious BDR processes. Your CIO wants you to spend time innovating on fresh ways to drive the business mission forward, not testing backups. The team feels their skills aren’t being used well and you’re all tired of overnights and weekends spent trying to keep your head above water when disaster hits.

You’re worried the next attack or outage will ruin you. Whether it’s a malfunctioning server, a staff mistake or a Ransomware attack, you know you’ll be facing hours or even days of downtime. You know your backups aren’t reliable, your BDR system is a collection of solutions that don’t always work well together and the organization will suffer a devastating loss in sales and productivity.

You don’t have the upfront budget for a complete BDR remodel. If you want to jettison your legacy BDR solution but can’t get sign-off to start fresh with an entirely new solution, DRaaS might be the right option. You can pay as you go or choose a flexible short-term contract, without a massive financial investment up front. You won’t need to pay for more and more rack space or overpay for unused resources, either.

Your team is inexperienced in disaster management. Or maybe they did go through a previous disaster – and it was clear you were understaffed and out of time. DRaaS can compensate for the skills currently missing on your team while they get back to their core mission instead of swapping tape backups in and out.

You understand how to evaluate DRaaS providers. You’ve prioritized fast recovery and performance, security and great support. You’re also asking for documentation like audit reports, references and attestations and even copies of warranties that show you the staff and technology that will be managing your backups and recovery.

If you’ve always handled your own disaster recovery, it may be initially unsettling to put your future in the hands of a third-party provider. But for many teams, DRaaS can be the best way to avoid the financial and reputational damage of a real disaster while gaining faster recovery, easier management and stronger security. Best of all, you’ll have the peace of mind of knowing your systems, apps and data are in expert hands, no matter what happens.