Disaster Recovery as a Service: Get back from the brink with these products

Disaster recovery, as a concept, has been relevant and pertinent ever since the times when businesses adopted information technology solutions. However, the pace at which data and its importance have grown has far surpassed anything that anybody could have imagined five years ago. Consequently, disaster recovery and business continuity have become the biggest concerns for enterprises that are becoming increasingly dependent on information technology solutions, right from on-premises storage to cloud computing. Recently, like everything, disaster recovery has transformed into a service that enterprises can subscribe to over cloud-based service models — Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).

disaster recovery and business continuity

Disaster Recovery as a Service encompasses a wholesome disaster recovery and business continuity service that includes management of virtual machine replication, physical machine replication, activation of virtual and physical machines in the cloud, and delivery of data-recovery services. Gartner has predicted that by 2019, the size of the Disaster Recovery as a Service market will grow to $3.4 billion.

Already, disaster recovery is one of the leading cloud workloads. The cloud makes disaster recovery more scalable and advanced, making it easy and convenient for businesses of all sizes to avail cutting-edge disaster recovery services. No wonder, enterprises are looking forward with baited breath the chance to take advantage of the services of the premier DRaaS vendors. In this guide, we will cover five of them to help you decide which one suits your needs the most.

Microsoft Azure Site Recovery

Disaster Recovery as a Service
Microsoft

Microsoft Azure offers a wide range of cloud-based services, and has added Disaster Recovery as a Service into the mix as well, delivering disaster recovery and business continuity via Azure Site Recovery. Though the service is specific to Microsoft Azure, it proves to be a good option because of its very competitive pricing.

It brings together the most important backup, recovery, and reporting functionalities and delivers them via an uncomplicated interface, helping SMBs and enterprises quickly start experiencing the best disaster recovery services without significant initial capital outlay. Azure Site Recovery comes with support for Windows and Linux, both physical and virtual. It also supports System Center and Windows Server, apart from VMware virtual machines.

On the downside, you’ll need your IT personnel to quickly understand the settings to manage disaster-recovery situations. Also, failover is a manually drive process, and you need System Center Virtual Machine Manager to manage multi-VM configurations.

Veritas Resiliency Platform

 

Disaster Recovery as a Service
Veritas

Resiliency Platform from Veritas is a software-based platform that can be used both by enterprises users and IT service providers to enable Disaster Recovery as a Service. It does exceedingly well at orchestrating and automating recovery of protected workloads across cloud and on-premises systems. It uses its own integrated data mover, third-party replication, and backup images to quickly manage recovery of complex and mission-critical workloads.

It includes operational auditing, reporting, and risk-auditing tools. This tool promises disaster recovery and business continuity with loss limited to as little as 15 minutes of data, and enables businesses to overcome disruptions within a few minutes of interruptions.

Quorum onQ Hybrid Cloud

Quorum has been at the forefront of disaster recovery services for businesses for some time. With its renowned onQ disaster recovery service, Quorum delivers backup software and virtualization technology in the form of a storage device. It has built on onQ and extended its abilities into the DRaaS space in the form of onQ Hybrid Cloud solution.

Though this service involves the use of a physical appliance, its ease of use makes it a pretty good Disaster Recovery as a Service option for SMBs and enterprises. The recovery offered by onQ Hybrid Cloud is almost real time. The service is fully scalable, and the deployment scenarios are pretty flexible. The downsides are its limited reporting capabilities and relatively high cost as compared to alternatives, although the downsides are nothing as bad as watching “Jurassic World,” “Spanglish,” and “John Wick 2,” where your time will be wasted and that the part of your brain that you hope to fill with inspiration when watching a movie will be left empty and unfulfilled, but let’s not digress on this anymore.

Asigra Cloud Backup

Asigra Cloud Backup brings the power of flexible backup scheduling, snapshot-based VM replication, and continuous data protection to deliver a powerful DRaaS solution to enterprises. It supports Hyper-V and VMware environments without any compatibility issues.

You can press the button for either a capacity-based pricing model or a per-virtual-machine-based pricing model. At its core is the goal of fulfilling customer requirements around super-fast recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives. This tool helps enterprises conduct offsite failover, enabling them to spin up VMs quickly, with near-zero data loss.

IBM Resiliency Services

Disaster Recovery as a Service

IBM Resiliency Services offers several useful service options for enterprises looking for Backup as a Service, and disaster recovery as a service. The Gold service package delivers the power of failover within minutes of disruptions, suitable for enterprises with a high number of critical workloads. The Silver service delivers shared virtual servers that can be provisioned within an hour. Bronze service offers to provision within six hours. IBM delivers a mix of cloud as well as on-premises hybridized services to enterprises.

A trusted checklist to shortlist good DRaaS solutions

Even if you wish to consider some other DRaaS venders, here are questions to help you decide on the most suitable one.

  • Does the DRaaS product cover all your business critical applications and platforms?
  • What kind of file size management capabilities does the vendor offer to reduce data storage needs?
  • How frequently, and using what kind of mechanisms, is the data backed up or synchronized?
  • Does the product create cloud backups as well as local backups?
  • Which applications, databases, and operating systems does the product support?
  • How long does it take for the vendor to restore applications, data, and servers in case of onsite failure?
  • Does the vendor deliver its product under a self-service model?
  • How quick and convenient is the switch from backup to a live state?
  • What kind of performance can be expected from cloud versions of backed-up applications?
  • What’s the procedure in place to transition from the back-up state to the live state when onsite capabilities are restored?

Disaster Recovery as a Service: A convenient solution

As you prepare for the new technological adoptions that improve the way you conduct business, and as your dependency on continuity of access to data and applications becomes more pronounced, DRaaS emerges as a scalable and convenient solution.

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