Venyu Blog

I’m convinced that the only entity on Mother Earth with more acronyms at its disposal is the federal government. Still, little by little, the IT industry is catching up.

Take Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service, or DRaaS.

As discussed by Forrester analyst Rachel Dines in a recent article for ComputerWorld UK, and embedded in this Cloud Computing Journal article by Valerie Fawzi, ”DRaaS “has the potential to make your DR implementations less expensive and more automated. Enterprises should be taking a close look at their open-systems business-critical (i.e., Tier II or mid-tier) applications to see if they would be a good candidate for DRaaS. DRaaS most likely won’t work for all of your applications, but it can be a powerful tool in your continuity portfolio.”

According to Dines DRaaS offers numerous benefits that outweigh other “classic” data recovery solutions such as tape or disk-based solutions including:

DRaaS is more dependable and easier to manage than tapes. If your tapes are part of or adjacent to the site of the disaster, they are subject to the same risks as the site that was compromised. If they are not within proximity, RTO becomes an issue. With DRaaS, however and leveraging the cloud as a remote recovery site, an organization is protected against disaster at the site of the disaster.

DRaaS reduces investment in costly duplication of your entire infrastructure in a second location. Virtualized environments, on the other hand, have far fewer provisioning and hardware requirements, so IT can test the entire system to ensure every aspect is working optimally.

 DRaaS substitutes or augments in-house IT expertise. If your organization lacks disaster recovery expertise in-house, a managed service offering provides a team of disaster recovery experts to provision, configure and test the DR infrastructure with you. If disaster strikes, a remote DR service team would be unaffected by your disaster, and can guide and manage the recovery process for you.

DRaaS enables you to recover more quickly. A recent report from the Aberdeen Group (“Small and Mid-Sized Organizations Gain Disaster Recovery Advantages Using Cloud Storage,” October 2010) revealed that organizations with a formal disaster recovery plan that used cloud storage in that plan found that they recovered from downtime events almost four times faster than those that did not use cloud storage in their disaster recovery plan.

As for what to consider moving to the cloud, Dines suggests the following factors to ensure a cloud vendor deploys and manages it effectively:

• Infrastructure: What happens if your vendor goes out of business? Look for a solution that will allow for onsite redundancy so that you can experience the benefits of the cloud while retaining a copy of your data.
• Security: It’s your system and information; how do you know that they’re protected and that no one else can access them? Encryption, security standards compliance and data redundancy are all things to look for when choosing a vendor.
• SLAs: What kind of recovery times can you expect when system information and data are transferred over the wire and reside somewhere in a different geographic location? Look for published SLAs for service guarantees and planned service outages so you know when and how your information is being handled.
• Recovery process: If the recovery infrastructure is out of my control, how can I be sure it will perform as expected? Make sure your vendor will work with you to perform DRs test so you are ready and fully understand the recovery process before disaster strikes.

DRaaS is all well and good but I think good old fashioned SaaS captures all of its nuances and dependencies just as well, and without adding to the increasingly cumbersome lexicon of acronyms that is quickly becoming the everyday language of the IT industry professional.

In fact my reaction to it is on par with a colleague who asked me what I thought of the new FOX TV show, Terranova, which follows the adventures of a dystopian group of late 21^st century earthlings who, in order to give our species a chance to survive various and sundry maladies, travel back to the time of dinosaurs and, not surprisingly, have to find ways of not getting eaten by them. With tongue firmly in cheek, I replied, “I liked it better when they called it Jurassic Park.”