Disaster Recovery Solutions for Managed Service Providers

What is a disaster recovery plan (DR Plan)?

An organization can be seriously harmed by disasters like natural disasters, cyberattack, or hardware failure. A disaster recovery plan helps to minimize the damage from such incidents.

A disaster recovery plan is a set of guidelines for an organization to recover from any unforeseen event. Such a plan should include:

• risk analysis
• risk mitigation and preparation
• business continuity plans
• data backup
• data recovery

It should also include contingency plans for all possible scenarios that might happen. These include a "business as usual" scenario, an emergency response scenario, and a post-disaster response scenario.

Plus, in today’s ransomware world, businesses need assurance that the backup solution itself is not vulnerable to corruption or attack.

What is the difference: DRaaS vs. backup as a service

Both Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and Backup as a Service (BaaS) are processes which involve protecting data and taking a backup of data.

Backup as a service is the process of backing up your data in the cloud, so it can be accessed anytime in case of data loss. This type of technology is also known as "cloud-based backup."

However as the names suggest DRaaS goes a step further and focuses on the recovery side of data loss. DRaaS is vital to ensuring that your business can continue to operate in a disaster, backup alone is no longer enough.

What is the cost of DRaaS?

When it comes to pricing, DRaaS varies across each solution and what services are included. It's important to review the specific costs involved in your disaster recovery management, in terms of both time and money.

Datto provides an all-inclusive flat fee DRaaS offering, meaning “everything is included”.

Alternatives that use the public cloud can prove costly, if not cost prohibitive. First and foremost is the cloud itself. The cost of using a public cloud for DRaaS can be daunting: Aside from the administrative and management overhead of setting up a cloud for recovery, the compute costs alone can make the solution out of reach for most organizations.

For example, there are storage costs just to keep backups in the cloud, and while there are many tiered storage offerings that look inexpensive, for DRaaS you need production caliber storage that will provide the performance to run recovered workloads. Secondly, there are all the other costs associated with recovering applications or entire systems in the cloud, namely compute costs for CPU/Memory, Networking, Egress, and additional software licensing.

Lastly, there is the administration overhead to set up and maintain a secure, always-on environment in which to recover. And speaking of security, with public clouds the MSP is responsible for data security.

Do you need cloud based disaster recovery?

It all depends on your business’ needs. Most businesses today are heavily dependent on technology and their data. Having a cloud-based DRaaS solution enables responding in a disaster from any location. In addition, cloud-based DR provides confidence that the recovery facility is geographically dispersed from the primary location, which is crucial to recovering from disasters that involve the power grid or mother nature.

Since cloud-based DRaaS has offsite copies of your data, you can recover your data in the cloud or to a new location if your primary location is unusable in a disaster. And of course, any DRaaS solution must facilitate the “failback” process for moving back to the primary systems and location when they are available, such as in the case of a natural disaster or where servers have to be re-imaged because they were infected with ransomware.