What is disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS)?

First, if you’re not familiar with disaster recovery, it’s the practice of restoring IT infrastructure after a cyberattack or any other event resulting in unexpected downtime.

Simply put, DRaaS is cloud-based disaster recovery. It’s slicker, stronger and speedier. Conventional backup and recovery plans take a lot longer to stand your IT estate up after a disruption.

Why DRaaS is important?

A study of over 500 UK businesses, conducted by Beaming, found nearly 50% of companies risk losing critical data and nearly four million companies put their very existence in danger by having inadequate backup and recovery strategies.

93% of companies filed for bankruptcy after significant data loss, according to an investigation by Texas A&M University. These findings applied to businesses that were without their data center for ten days or more.

In the traditional sense, disaster recovery starts with the setup of a dedicated physical site, which needs essential maintenance and support to maximize protection, meaning it can prove to be a rather costly and resource-intensive method.

According to IDG research, 77% of CIOs say they wish to reduce the overall costs of DR solutions, and many are looking to DRaaS providers to do so. The DRaaS advantage over conventional DR is that it comes with best practices, and it sits on the provider’s purpose-built infrastructure.

These are the serious risks to your data. Data loss is not always the result of a sophisticated cyberattack. Businesses can struggle to recover from a variety of disasters, such as:

• Hardware or system malfunction
• Human errors, such as accidental deletion or misfiling
• Software crashes
• Malware virus infections
• Software corruption
• Virus attacks
• Natural disasters such as fire, floods and hurricanes

Why should your company have a DRaaS plan?

No business should be without DRaaS. It’s a combination of tough security and a speedy reaction, ensuring optimal protection for your digital assets.

When delivered “as a service,” DR becomes lighting fast and has extra resilience at a stronger level. DRaaS can rapidly replicate critical portions of your IT infrastructure — or even your entire IT environment — to another location. With multiple replication target host sites, it ensures geographic diversity.

DRaaS ensures the time to return applications to production is reduced because the data does not need to be restored over the internet. The service can be especially useful for small and medium-sized businesses that lack the necessary expertise to provision, configure and test an effective disaster recovery plan. Using DRaaS also means your organization doesn’t have to invest in – and maintain – its own off-site DR environment.

Create the best defense for your business

By working with you to respond to IT complexities across all cloud and on-premises resources, Service Express can help improve your ability to respond and recover from disruptive or disastrous events, minimizing economic impact, brand damage, or potential for legal liability.

We also offer support for a wide range of operating systems, including IBM i, AIX, Linux and Windows, whilst supporting your x86 and AMD hardware, along with storage, network, private and public cloud environments.

If you’re looking to reduce costs, increase agility and maximize uptime, we can meet your needs with a completely personalized, proactive and cost-effective service, making your IT work harder and smarter for your business.

The looming risks for finance, retail and healthcare

“There are increasing attacks on production systems and their backups. If you’ve only got one copy of production data and you’re in the financial industry, that will hold your only copy of client and transaction records. If it gets attacked, encrypted or stolen, and you have no secondary backup, then you will be at the mercy of whoever attacked you.”

When it comes to banks, fintech and other highly regulated organizations, inadequate protection can land you in trouble with the regulators as well as lose you significant amounts of money.

Small and medium businesses are often exposed

Ransomware attacks are up against small and medium businesses because they can’t or haven’t invested in the level of cybersecurity that protects both production and backup environments.

The rise of ransomware, in numbers

The following statistics may be chilling reading for those looking after IT infrastructure, but we’re on hand to provide advice for those seeking to boost their cybersecurity.

• 30% of data breaches are carried out by internal bad actors.
• Globally, 40% of servers have had one or more outages over the past twelve months.
• 43% of cyberattacks are aimed at small businesses, but only 14% are prepared to defend themselves.
• Volume of investment in the cybersecurity sector is led by medium-sized businesses, followed by large, small and then micro.
• The average time to identify and contain a data breach fell from 287 days in 2021 to 277 days in 2022, a decrease of 10 days or 3.5%.

The typical perception of a hacker is that they go into your system and bang! They’ve immediately launched an attack and wiped out your business.

Real life isn’t like that, as most attackers will come into your system quietly and reside there for quite a while, perusing your information and collecting what they need to cause maximum harm to you. When they’re ready, they launch their attack, and it’s always on their terms.

The reality of cybersecurity is that the attacker only must be right once, whereas you must be right every time as a defender. Thankfully, as cybersecurity tools develop, this paradigm is changing where the attacker must be perfect to avoid detection once on the system, but these tools may be expensive.

Gambling with tape

For many decades, IT infrastructures have backed data up onto tape. Many businesses still rely on this traditional method. In optimal conditions, there’s nothing wrong with this solution, but it often takes a long time to get back online because you’ve got to find the tape, plug it in and stand everything up.

Quite a few system administrators have stories of tape failures. It’s not the most reliable backup method when compared to modern storage such as solid-state disk.

The answer is in an offsite backup

An offsite backup is vital in ensuring complete backup and DR. This establishes data redundancy. Service Express has considerable skills and resources, along with the technology partnerships, to set up the required hardware and networking that fits into your existing IT estate.

This strategy brings in a substantial degree of resilience when it comes to cybersecurity threats aimed at your industry. It’s a difference maker that no company should be without.

How organizations are mitigating the risk of ransomware attacks with the right disaster recovery plan

How are organizations thinking about protecting their data from ransomware attacks? Hear from a panel of experts from Service Express, IBM and Veeam as they discuss how cyberattacks can impact organizations in different industries.

Watch now to learn more about:

• The current and growing cybersecurity trends and challenges
• The risk of ransomware attacks
• How to build a disaster recovery plan that could save you from financial loss and reputation damage and ensure business continuity

This 45-minute webinar provides a holistic view of cybersecurity and ransomware trends with practical guidance on what organizations need to think about in terms of disaster recovery.

Top Off-Prem Drivers

Pre-Determine Disaster Recovery (DR) Team Members

A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) needs many points-of-view and operational focuses to be truly comprehensive enough to be effective. A planning process, action and communication will take place on multiple levels prior to, during and after a disaster. Ensuring the appropriate team members are involved will make for a smooth process.

THINK BIG

Involve key business leaders to play a significant role in your disaster recovery planning process. It is a company challenge and responsibility, not just an IT problem. Facilities and customer support should also have a place at the planning table.

THE DR PLAN CONDUCTOR

Assign a Disaster Recovery plan owner/project manager who understands the scope and impact of the project. They should be able to clearly articulate what is needed for your disaster recovery solution from the various team members, and hold all parties accountable.

INTERNAL SUPPORT

Your disaster recovery team members should include those with IT infrastructure expertise – as well as collective problem-solving skills, decision-making confidence, detail-oriented focus and the ability to communicate effectively.

EXTERNAL SUPPORT

Do not overlook your vendors and partners’ disaster recovery solutions. These professional contacts can generate helpful input, experience and tactics to strengthen your final disaster recovery solution.

How to Create Your Disaster Recovery Plan

Start with a business impact analysis (BIA). This detailed audit will help you determine the ramification of business disruption on your critical functions. Using this analysis, you can identify gaps and the impact they may have on the organization.

To get started on collecting data for your BIA, begin with a survey from each department outlining their top 3-5 critical processes with risk analysis and provide documentation for each. The results will help you identify essential business processes and resources needed to maintain business continuity.

Use the insights from the survey data collected to create your BIA report that details the risk potential on each department in the event of a disaster. This report should describe each process and prioritize the order of events that need to take place in your disaster recovery solution, in order to restore business as usual.

Determine Your Recovery Time Objective and Your Recovery Point Objective

You should take your business impact analysis a step further by defining your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Each involve a detailed risk analysis.

Technopedia defines Recovery Time Objective as “the maximum desired length of time allowed between an unexpected failure or disaster and the resumption of normal operations and service levels”. Your RTO designates the point in time after a failure or disaster at which the consequences of the interruption become unacceptable. Beyond downtime, RTO also includes the steps IT must take to resolve the application and its data.

RPO stands for Recovery Point Objective and addresses your organization’s definition of the maximum amount of data that can be lost before the impact to the business is unacceptable.

When thinking of RPO, focus on the point in time you need to be able to restore back to. Historically, organizations had an RPO of whenever nightly data backups were taken. This is changing with replication becoming more widespread, allowing for Recovery Point Objectives to be as short as 5-10 seconds. 

Test Your Disaster Recovery Plan

As the windspeed increases or the flood waters rise, your goal is protecting and preserving uptime, not discovering weaknesses in your disaster recovery response. One popular method for testing your plan is a tabletop exercise. A tabletop exercise is a meeting to discuss a simulated emergency situation. The goal of a tabletop exercise is to uncover the strengths and weaknesses in your disaster recovery plan. Testing your plan for the first time during an actual disaster will not serve you well.

To set up for a successful tabletop exercise, plan for the following:

1. Set goals. Determine what you want to achieve and how you will evaluate the state of your plan. Which issues do you want to address? For example, availability/accessibility of fuel for generators, slow restoration of city services due to skeleton crews, transportation and power challenges, communication strategies with employees, partners and customers.
2. Select participants. For initial testing, it can be best to start small. Retest with larger group as your disaster plan evolves.
3. Establish ground rules. Don’t throw in the kitchen sink. Stick to the goals. And maintain a no-fault/no-blame attitude.
4. Develop a disaster scenario. Make it realistic. Use real-world situations and, if possible, use an emergency event that has happened within your organization.
5. Conduct the entire exercise. Run through the exercise from start to finish. Document uncertainties for follow-up.
6. Key vendors. Do you rely on any third-party vendors? Consider asking them to participate as well.
7. Document results. Take detailed notes throughout. Discuss what went well and what didn’t. Is this a realistic disaster recovery solution? Update the plan!