What is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)?

Aug 12, 2021 | Nikolay Petrov

Today, business data is more valuable and sensitive than ever. In fact, it’s one of the most valuable assets of any company and organizations cannot afford to lose it. This is why it must be backed up and restored. This can be done in two ways: by creating their own on-premises environment or using a third-party vendor to replicate and host their information.

DRaaS, or Disaster Recovery as a Service, is an option that an increasing number of businesses are considering. Many are uncertain about what DRaaS actually is and what it actually does for your business.

In this post, you’ll find everything you need to know about DRaaS, how it is used in business today, why it is important, and how to get started using such services.

What is DRaaS?

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is a cloud computing service model that enables organizations to back up their data and IT infrastructure to a third party and provide failover in the event of a power outage or another type of business disruption. DRaaS can be especially useful to organizations that lack the necessary expertise to maintain an effective disaster recovery plan (DRP).

Why is DRaaS useful?

Millions of businesses around the world encounter some form of natural disaster. DRaaS is essential in the event of a power outage, hardware failure, file corruption, human error, earthquake, flood, hurricane, thunderstorm, wildfire, winter weather, or a tornado, striking your data center. Major interruptions such as your website going down or losing all your customer data will likely occur.

DRaaS offers numerous benefits for any business. First, and most importantly, it improves your data protection plan significantly. Utilizing off-site cloud hosting ensures your data is safe from being wiped out and accessible if your internal infrastructure becomes unavailable. DRaaS works in a similar way, providing a backup cloud infrastructure for your operations to continue running even if your internal system is down.

DRaaS focuses on a short Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

• RPO refers to the point furthest back in time to which you can restore data and continue functioning with minimal disruption to business operations. This also describes the total quantity of data that can be lost during that period, in accordance with the tolerable limits required for business continuity.
  Typical recovery time objectives are within 4 hours and involve geographically dispersed machines.
• RTO is defined as the total length of time that can pass between the disastrous occurrence and the resumption of business operations, any longer beyond which the consequences will reach unacceptable levels.

Traditional DR methods

Common DR approaches often use a third-party backup application that locks data to a specific vendor, usually requiring its own server and storage. These applications perform multiple full backups regardless of any data change, increase write time and storage costs. To ensure redundancy, data is also written on on-premises disk and tape. For safety, these tapes are often stored off-site. This duplication of data increases capital expense for storage hardware, takes time, and requires human and other resource expenses.

In case of failure, data must first be restored from the backup with the same proprietary software used to replicate it to the cloud. This two-step process further delays access to the data. Packaging data inside another container makes restoration more vulnerable to corruption, locks data to the vendor, and usually requires full restoration before data is available.

How Tiger Technology can help you enable Disaster Recovery with the cloud

An ideal DR solution should provide maximum availability, data redundancy, and allow mission-critical processes to resume immediately. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) should be as short as minutes.

With Tiger Bridge, intelligent data management software, data is replicated to high-availability storage (99.99999999999999), effectively protecting all server data from local failure. Tiger Bridge supports multi-tier object storage for cost flexibility. Tiger Bridge also supports tape and disk targets for maximum data protection.

Tiger Bridge integrates at the kernel level of Windows NTFS and is compatible with Windows DFS, VSS, and typical anti-virus services. Data is stored in its native format with no third-party backup application required to write or read data.

With Tiger Bridge, new incremental data is continuously and transparently replicated as it is created, so RPO is as short as the transfer time of the last modified file. This continuous replication removes the need for regular full backups, reducing transmission times and storage costs. RTO is short and recovery from any server failure is easy with Tiger Bridge. In the event of partial data loss, users simply access cloud data on demand and resume operations. In the case of a complete site failure, cloud data can be pointed to a virgin recovery server from which users can immediately begin working with critical files. Data can be fully or partially restored to any number of new or repaired servers. In all cases, data is replicated and synchronized across sources.

Final Thoughts

The best disaster recovery strategy requires a level of resiliency that is simply not available in legacy DR solutions. Whether your business is an SMB or а large enterprise, data safety is always a top priority, and a company needs more than just implementing a cloud backup. Moreover, you need to be prepared for the worst-case scenario and should consider using DRaaS with as short an RPO and RTO as possible.

Tiger Bridge is an ideal DRaaS solution. It shortens RPO and RTO and allows mission-critical operations to resume immediately after a failure. Tiger Bridge is transparent to users and applications, avoids vendor lock-in by preserving data in its native format, and supports services such as DFS, VSS, and anti-virus.

Want to learn more about using Tiger Bridge to enable Disaster Recovery? Check out our dedicated videos.

Ready to try it out for yourself? Get Tiger Bridge now without any commitment.