DRaaS is a long-term insurance policy for ‘always-on’ businesses

Ashok Acharya

Natural disasters are seldom predictable and happen mostly without any warning signs. A good example of this is last year’s Chennai floods caused due to incessant rains. The floods not only brought the entire city, business and daily lives to standstill, it had a demoralizing effect due to the magnitude of damage caused. From a business standpoint; it puts the spotlight on the need for business continuity and the importance to have verified and tested plan to stay ‘available’ even during a disaster. There is a dire need for enterprises to efficiently and effectively manage unforeseen outages of any magnitude, especially to enable the ‘Always-On’ enterprise.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) addresses these challenges and enables enterprises to become available. Today’s digital environment demands organizations to make their data and applications available 24x7x365. This leaves enterprise with no room for any downtime or loss of critical data. Additionally, along with faster backup during emergency, it is equally critical to have data available.

However, CIOs face the challenge to manage the data explosion with legacy systems that are just not equipped to address the demands of modern business. CXOs need to put DRaaS as the focal point of their disaster management strategy, especially when disaster recovery (DR), budget and complexity cannot be managed due to traditional DR options. When strategically implemented, DRaaS not only provides flexibility but also automates the process and provides reliability.

Amongst the key obstacles in implementing a well-oiled DR strategy is the fact that often DR is considered as an afterthought or planned separately from the core data protection strategy. This adds another layer of complexity to manage and diverts the attention from the core datacenter strategy. As a result, lack of reliability and trust in an organization’s DR capability is highlighted during in the event of disaster.

An integrated approach consisting DRaaS at the heart of the availability strategy should be the key focus area for CXOs. IT service providers need to demonstrate to customers a consistent experience while reducing cost, complexity and enhance reliability of data through a combination of backup, replication and cloud services. Enterprises should truly leverage the potential of cloud for easy and transparent implementation.

For example, the availability platform for the hybrid cloud model, businesses and enterprises of all sizes can ensure availability for virtual, physical, and cloud-based workloads to deliver capabilities like:

1. Enterprise Continuity: Recovery Service Level Objectives (SLOs) of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data; Disaster Recovery (DR) orchestration
2. Workload Mobility: Availability for workloads across any cloud or location, to maximize IT investments and increase flexibility
3. Compliance & Visibility: Proactive monitoring, reporting, testing and documentation to ensure business and regulatory requirements are met

One of the biggest challenges for a DR service is managing network issues. In the event of a disaster, enterprise should not only manage data replication for disaster recovery but also build a comprehensive DRaaS capability that manages network issues regardless of physical location. This eliminates networking complexity, high management cost and the hassle of reconfiguring networks for DR testing or failovers by preserving the communication between running replica virtual machines (VMs).

DRaaS is a long-term insurance policy, which enables CXOs to take advantage of cloud technology for easy and transparent offerings. What is more critical is that the IT department should derive the benefits of hybrid cloud architecture from the DRaaS provider without compromising on the performance and the reliability. Especially during a disaster, IT departments can deliver a failure recovery time and the time interval for data backup, also called Recovery Time and Point Objective (RTPO), of less than 15 minutes.

Natural disasters can pose new challenges and risk to business existence. And to address this, organizations need to plan a more robust and reliable DR strategy for the ‘Always-On’ business.  An intelligent and agile availability solution helps companies reduce the impact of unscheduled and non-predictable disruptions. As every data loss and every second of downtime costs money and prestige that can change the fortune of an organization.

The author is Regional Director for India and the SAARC region, Veeam