5 Advantages and Disadvantages of Disaster Recovery as a Service | Drawbacks & Benefits of Disaster Recovery as a Service

Business need to protect their data from all soft of disasters to ensue customer satisfaction, trust and loyalty. In the event of a disaster, there can be some critical data loss paving the way for business risk and downfall. In order to avid these types of catastrophic failures, you need to have a proper disaster recovery strategy. 

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is a cloud computing model which uses its resources to allow data and applications to recover following a disaster. This type of setup ensures business continuity even in case of a failure. It came as a alternative to other disaster recovery methods. DRaaS entirely relies upon the third party providers with public or private cloud storage. It is available from the cloud service providers. 

The demand for DRaaS among enterprises are on a rise due to their pay as you go pricing scheme. Al though there are lots of reasons why DRaaS is the best method for safeguarding business data, there are some drawbacks. If you consider using DRaaS, it is important to make a decision if its the right choice.

In this article, I will be mentioning about 5 Advantages and Disadvantages of Disaster Recovery as a Service | Drawbacks & Benefits of Disaster Recovery as a Service. Though this post, you will know the pros and cons of using DRaaS.

Let's get started,

Advantages of Disaster Recovery as a Service

1. Cost

Compared to an inhouse recovery infrastructure, a DRaaS solution offers higher levels of cost effectiveness. The third party DRaaS provider offers different pricing schemes which suits your budget. Even though there is a upfront cost in DRaaS, still you can assure that this is cost effective in the long term. 

Apart from the actual service, you are not required to pay anything. For an example, you don't need to pay for a storage space that you don't actually use. Additionally, there is no cost involved in buildings, physical servers, storage, hardware. And you can save the on going IT employee expenses. 

2. Scalability

DRaaS solutions are also helpful for business scalability and growth. Unlike a local backup or offsite DRaaS, cloud based solutions are easily scalable. DRaaS allows their infrastructure to be instantly upgraded. Whenever you business expands, the DRaaS too can be scaled accordingly to fulfill your business needs. 

3. Flexibility

In terms of flexibility, a DRaaS solution is more advantegous compared to other forms of recovery methods. DRaaS offers various range of recovery services including data protection and managed storage. Using this single technology, users will be able to take control of the entire data protection unit.

4. Recovery Time

Once disaster happens, business need to recover quickly. If it takes longer, it means your business is going to lose more money. This can seriously affect the business productivity. When you use a DRaaS, there is complete assurance that system, applications and services will be restored instantly. Normally a DRaaS solution allows business to recover data is less than 15 seconds.

5. Technical Support

Reputable DRaaS providers offer 24/7 technical supports. They are more experienced in recovery planning than your staff members. Whenever there is a problem they try their level best to sort it out quickly and efficiently. This kind of support uplifts the DRaaS solution reliability. 

Disadvantages of Disaster Recovery as a Service

1. Reliability

Data and security is definitely a concern if it is with a third party provider. Not all the third party providers are trustworthy. If you happen to choose a wrong DRaaS provider, all the company confidential information will be at risk. That is the reason why still many companies themselves prefer performing disaster recovery operations. 

2. Pricing Schemes

Most DRaaS providers offer pay-for-what you use model. Other providers require you to pay based on the tiers of service. More expensive the tier is, less the time it takes to recover. For an example, you will be able to recover data in seconds or minutes if you use the expensive tiers. For the cheapest ones however it can take up to 48 hours for recovery. 

3. Network Connectivity

DRaaS is a program running in the cloud. So to perform any operations you must have an active internet connection. The performance of a DRaaS solution entirely relies on the internet connection. If your internet connection is poor or not stable issues might arise when backing up your data.

4. Bandwidth

Bandwidth is a major concern for organizations in DRaaS. DRaaS providers bandwidth isn't sufficient enough to handle all of their customers. Their bandwidth is only helpful in handling occasional disaster recovery projects. This problem is already experienced in virtual machine applications such as SQL. 

5. Data Center Migrations

DRaaS faces some issues when migrating data back to an experienced data center. The recovery process of DRaaS works completely different from the business infrastructure. In most cases, it does not allow the access of in house data when required. This is because DRaaS is most likely a cloud based solution.