10 Ways DRaaS Can Save Your Bacon

Names can be so misleading.

Take baking soda. Many of us think of baking soda as only an ingredient used for baking, or maybe something that helps to keep our refrigerators odor-free. But baking soda has many other uses, and is surprisingly good for your health and home, too. The use cases for baking soda vary from basic daily hygiene, injuries, digestive issues, stomach pain, coughs and even sore throats.

DRaaS (disaster recovery as a service) faces the same perceived limitations. There are many applications of DRaaS that go beyond recovering your operations in the wake of a genuine site-wide disaster.

That’s why we created this infographic: 10 Ways DRaaS Can Save Your Bacon.
Download your copy: HERE.

Recover from Ransomware…Fast

It’s one thing for a user’s files to get infected by ransomware, it’s quite another to have a production database or mission-critical application infected. But, restoring these database and apps for a traditional backup solution (appliance, cloud or tape-based backup) will take hours or even days — which can cost a business tens of thousands of dollars.
Acts of Nature- Hurricanes, Tornadoes & Floods

If your data center gets knocked offline by mother nature, you need a Plan B to restore operations, so your employees can stay productive and your customers aren’t disrupted. DRaaS offers simplicity, rapid recovery, and lower costs (both in terms of infrastructure and administrative overhead). Just as important, replicating your backups and other key resources in geographically disparate data centers also means they won’t be wiped out by local disasters. Because your data and VMs are replicated to the cloud, failing over production systems in the cloud takes minutes …even if your server is under water.
End User Errors

Recent ransomware attacks, including WannaCry and Petya, prove the adage that a chain is only as strong as the weakest link, and the weakest link in a data security chain is very often the end-user. Ransomware spreads easily across connected systems once a user unwittingly allows entry. Spoofing and phishing are not simply about stealing data or credit card numbers, they are about stealing access to systems. DRaaS equips you with a reset switch that helps you recover from end user mistakes – whether it be a phishing attack or accidental deletion of critical files.
Spilt coffee, Power Surges, and Bad Disks (Micro-Diasters)

While hurricanes and natural disasters grab all the headlines, it’s far more likely a company will face downtime from such mundane causes as hardware failure, corrupted software, human errors, or even spilt coffee. For this reason, a cloud DR solution that includes an on-site storage component and the ability to provide local, rapid recovery for failed servers have considerable appeal. DRaaS is absolutely built for these types of micros-disasters.
Hardware Upgrades

Traditionally, hardware refresh cycles have averaged around five years, but they have accelerated during the last decade. Some businesses now work on a three-year replacement cycle. Replacing servers and other critical hardware allows organizations to deploy updated equipment intended to improve reliability, enable new and anticipated capabilities, and save money in the long term, but they are usually accompanied with significant “planned downtime” — usually performed in the middle of the night or on weekends.With DRaaS, you can failover your production environment to the cloud where you can comfortably run your production operations – effectively eliminating any planned downtime. Once running in the cloud, you can perform the upgrade or refresh to your production equipment and then shift replication fromthe cloud to your production data center via “failback” procedures.
Sandbox for Production Testing

Maintaining a separate test environment can be expensive, especially when you want to do a test against full production data. Modern disaster recovery as a service solutions often include the ability to “sandbox” or partition virtual machines so testing can be done without impacting the still-functional production servers. Sandboxing is often much more difficult in typical on-premises solutions using traditional virtualization management tools. Since it already contains replicas of your systems and built-in network connectivity, your DRaaS environment can easily be repurposed as a sandbox for production testing.
Lift and Shift Workloads to the Cloud

According to the Harvey Nash/KPMG 2016 CIO survey, 31% of responding CIOs said they are investing significantly in the cloud today and 49% expect to do so over the next three years. In fact, Forresterexpects 50% of large enterprises to have production workloads running in the cloud by 2018. But migrating workloads to a public cloud demands a seamless, non-disruptive transition. This migration process is known as “lift and shift.” And here again, DRaaS can play an important role by enabling you to automatically capture workloads and migrate them to the cloud – effectively running your applications in failover mode in perpetuity.
Pass Compliance Mandates with Flying Colors

Disaster recovery solutions are just about table stakes for any modern organization, but they are especially important for public companies and organizations governed by compliance mandates (such as financial services, banking, and healthcare organizations). With DRaaS, testing and monitoring your DR plan is becoming simpler with Drag and Drop Orchestration, all baked into the cost of the subscription. Plus, leading DRaaS providers offer smaller agencies enterprise-class security and encryption of data in transit and at rest within top-tier data centers.
Stolen Laptops

Because of the mobility of today’s workforce and the dispersion of important intellectual property within your organization, companies more and more are asking, “So, I understand all this data is out there. What happens to it if something gets lost or stolen?” When your company laptop goes missing, it’s time to leap into action! Whether it was stolen from your car, forgotten in the airport security line or was physically wrenched from your hands in a grab-and-run. With DRaaS, you can quickly recover your data and applications on a new (or temporary) laptop since your data is always protected within the cloud.
Ahhh…Peace of Mind

It’s hard to put a price tag on peace of mind. Real-time DR solutions are expensive, complex and require a fair amount of hand holding. DRaaS presents a refreshing alternative that provides flexibility in terms of commitment, capacity and cost. But, more importantly, it’s your insurance policy that protects against the unexpected. DRaaS provides operational resiliency that lets you spin up VMs — locally or in the cloud — in minutes. With a proper DRaaS solution, you’ll minimize the loss of production data and impact of downtime to your business.

DRaaS isn’t just for disasters any more. It’s for micro and macro outages. It’s designed for rapid failover of routine server outages and rapid recovery from full-blown ransomware attacks. It’s for system upgrades, hardware refreshes and lift and shift migrations.

10 Ways DRaaS Can Save Your Bacon