A prime example of a cloud offering that can be a game-changer for many smaller companies is the advent of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). Small and mid-sized businesses often neglect to create a coherent disaster recovery strategy due to financial constraints. They may also believe that a disaster recovery plan is only appropriate for larger corporations. Software-based infrastructure and the cloud have changed that perspective and have put comprehensive disaster recovery within the reach of any size company. 

Benefits of Employing DRaaS

There are a number of advantages to using a cloud provider when instituting a disaster recovery plan. Some of them are applicable to organizations that already have another type of recovery strategy in place. They offer benefits which may persuade companies that already have a disaster recovery strategy to take a look at moving it to the cloud. 

• Affordability - Cost is a major impediment when smaller companies consider developing a disaster recovery plan. Duplicating your computing environment at an alternate location can be expensive. So can maintaining and upgrading the equipment to ensure its reliability. Using a cloud provider eliminates the need for capital expenditures. You rent the space and services needed at a pre-determined rate that allows for incorporating this critical protection for your business into your monthly budget.

• Scalability - DRaaS scales easily to keep up with your changing requirements. This is one of the basic advantages of any cloud solution and can be especially important where disaster recovery is concerned. As your primary system changes, your cloud provider can tailor their offering to enable you to fully recover your environment.
• Freedom from geographic constraints - Using a DRaaS solution enables you to recover your systems anywhere in the world. This can be vitally important as the scope of a disaster can potentially affect your recovery site as well as your primary location.  

• Reduced recovery time - Two metrics by which disaster recovery plans are judged are recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs). A DRaaS solution can be synced to your primary location and offer automatic failover in the event of a disaster. This dramatically reduces the RPOs and RTOs when compared to a traditional disaster recovery scheme. 

• Creating a comprehensive plan - Employing a DRaaS solution enables an organization to fully protect all of their computing resources with a thorough plan enacting by a single provider. Contrast this to traditional plans that may need to engage multiple departments which only handle a fraction of the environment.

The cloud continues to offer new and inventive methods which impact many areas of an enterprise’s computing landscape. DRaaS allows any organization that values its data to create a plan to protect those assets in the event of a disaster. The excuse that disaster recovery is too complex or expensive for your business has become obsolete.