With the businesses running across the globe, at different geographic locations, current enterprise systems have become large and overly complex. Applications and data are fundamental to business and the smallest downtime can cause millions of losses. Imagine a natural catastrophe to strike at any location making data loss. Rebuilding infrastructure and getting data recovered is next to impossible thing if Business Contingency or Business continuity Plans (BCP) are not in place. Disaster Recovery is a subset of BCP. It is vital to have Disaster Recovery Plans ready. In this article, we will see what a disaster recovery is? What is Disaster Recovery Plan and what are the available solutions.

What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster Recovery basically means getting vital infrastructure recovered and protecting from significant damages. It involves a security planning which includes policies and procedures to maintain business continuity in case of disaster or disruptive events. Loss of Data or disruption of service causes critical financial impact. Thus, it is very much important that your disaster recovery plan is ready in place in order to come out of disasters with minimal impacts.

What is Disaster Recovery Plan?

Disaster Recovery Plan also referred as business continuity plan or business process contingency plan has the procedures and policies described in order to deal with the disaster to make sure that the business critical functions can be continued without disruption or at least with minimal disruptions

What are Disaster Recovery Solutions?

Traditional disaster Recovery strategy involves building a DR infrastructure where you need to take regular backups of your business critical data and applications, have them up to date on your DR locations which is at a geographically different location. If you want, you can work with a traditional availability services partner who can host your DR environment. However, the traditional disaster recovery method is cost and resource exhaustive as compared to modern DR solutions.

There are easy to manage and affordable disaster recovery solutions now available in market, such as Cloud Based Disaster Recovery and Recovery as a Service (RaaS)

Cloud Based Disaster Recovery

Cloud computing, since based on virtualization, can virtualize the entire server with its operating system, patches, applications and its entire data in a single virtual server. This virtual server can be backed up to an offsite Data Center. The data can be easily transferred from one Data Center to another and can be recovered easily. Since virtual server is hardware independent, the huge cost, the resource management and related planning for managing the hardware, get reduced to minimal amount, thus proves to be a cost-effective and efficient approach of disaster recovery.

Recovery as a Service (RaaS)

Recovery as a Service also referred as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is service where cloud computing plays key role in protecting an application and related data from a natural disaster or any event of service disruption by fully recovering it on cloud. In case of RaaS, your physical or virtual servers, applications are replicated to the cloud, so in the event of a disaster it can be brought back online immediately. Third party providers provide RaaS Services either through contract or pay-per-use basis and accordingly DRaaS requirements and expectation are contract or pay-per-use basis and accordingly DRaaS requirements and expectation are documented in Service Level agreements, thus gives a flexibility in DRaaS contracts. The Key here is that in the event of a disaster the DRaaS service provider should meet the defined recovery time and recovery point objectives.