Disaster recovery - Why DRaaS?

As the digital economy grows ever more dominant, processing, storing and protecting data is an essential and on-going challenge. Cybercrime, security and regulatory concerns mean many existing infrastructures lack the necessary protection are struggling to cope.

In our super-connected lives, systems and applications are accessible from anywhere - and email, messaging and social media platforms continually bombard us with information and offers demanding our attention. So, it’s no surprise that a cybercrime has arisen, with attackers perpetually inventing innovative and imaginative scams that exploit weaknesses in our systems and behaviours.

The core element of a successful online presence is an organisation’s brand identity and business reputation, and this should be nurtured and protected at all costs. The speed at which some companies and brands rise to prominence - and then fall from ‘hero to zero’ in no time at all, is making organisations rethink their business continuity planning.

System downtime may be caused by human error, technical issues, or from any number of malicious cyber incidents across the attack surface area, and legacy infrastructures run by in-house IT teams can be soft targets for cybercriminals. With security now firmly on the board room agenda, advanced cyber protection with assured business continuity and no single point of failure is ‘mission-critical’.

Disaster recovery plans are nothing new, but ‘Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service’ (DRaaS or RaaS) is becoming increasingly popular as businesses seek to alleviate the strain and responsibility of owning and running in-house systems.

Resilient, cloud-based RaaS protection continuously tracks, captures, and stores all data changes, enabling systems to be ‘rewound’ to any point in time just before a failure.

In the event of an incident - the automated failover system moves the running of a customer’s systems and applications to a dedicated, separate and secure RaaS service. IT departments remain in total control and operations are immediately restored to their pre-incident position, with no disruption to service.

It’s a highly secure, reliable and cost-effective way for organisations to protect themselves from costly system outages, and having a reliable, always available ‘back-up’ infrastructure that continuously updates itself and then automatically steps in to run things the moment an incident occurs is a major business protection benefit.

Furthermore, it’s estimated that compared to traditional business continuity platforms - RaaS delivers savings of around 70%, and Sure’s RaaS services operate from our fully owned, highly secure, on-island datacentres, ensuring data sovereignty.

RaaS has benefits at several different levels in the business.

• It enables virtual servers and data to be recovered to an earlier point in time effortlessly at both individual and server group level, regardless of whether this is due to misconfiguration or malicious activity.
• It provides the ability for the business to demonstrate an effective IT business continuity plan without affecting live server, application and data workloads.
• It offers a simple route to test and apply changes to virtual IT environment workloads without live affecting production.
• In a disaster scenario, it enables IT business continuity in minutes for protected virtual servers, applications and data, through a few mouse clicks.

RaaS protects organisations from data and revenue theft, and with no downtime or loss of service - business reputation remains protected and unaffected.