Disaster recovery is one of the most appealing use cases for the cloud. Disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) enables the business to avoid the investment of building and managing a separate data center that must perform up to par with production systems, but by and large effectively sits unused on standby. DRaaS also enables on-demand, elastic compute cycles to coexist alongside the data itself, for fast failover in the event of a production system outage. However, many IT professionals overlook the fact that the majority of DRaaS solutions require expensive investments in net new software and in conversion of existing software.
To level set, DRaaS software is designed to protect production data that typically lives on premises. Core functionalities of DRaaS software usually include replication of backup copy data to the cloud and provide the user interface through which applications may be rebooted in the cloud in the event that the production infrastructure goes down.
Firstly, it is important for IT professionals to understand that it might not be worth the cost of adopting DRaaS if they are only interested in obtaining disaster recovery capabilities from the DRaaS provider (for instance, if they still intend to procure backup capabilities separately). This stands to create a scenario in which multiple software licenses need to be procured, multiple software platforms need to be managed, multiple databases need to be created and managed, and scheduling issues between backup jobs and disaster recovery arise. In some instances, the organization might even need a third tool for test and development use cases, meaning that three copies of the same production data are being created, stored and managed. This quickly gets expensive and cumbersome.
Even if the organization is consolidating around a new platform, the IT team must be trained on that new platform, which requires valuable time that IT staff today can ill afford. Furthermore, some critical features might not be included in the new platform, and backup history could be lost during migration.
At the end of the day, it is important for IT professionals to evaluate in net the new capabilities that they may receive and their value to the business, as a result of an addition of or migration to DRaaS. To learn more about common oversights when it comes to implementing DRaaS, access Storage Switzerland’s on demand webinar in collaboration with KeepItSafe.
Senior Analyst, Krista Macomber produces analyst commentary and contributes to a range of client deliverables including white papers, webinars and videos for Storage Switzerland. She has a decade of experience covering all things storage, data center and cloud infrastructure, including: technology and vendor portfolio developments; customer buying behavior trends; and vendor ecosystems, go-to-market positioning, and business models. Her previous experience includes leading the IT infrastructure practice of analyst firm Technology Business Research, and leading market intelligence initiatives for media company TechTarget.
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