Jason Buffington .com

There are several reasons that I love DRaaS for Disaster Recovery using Managed Services – especially when it’s part of your Cyber Resilience plan.  Let’s talk about a few of them and why you should love DRaaS too.

video transcript

Last week, I reminded folks that if you aren’t testing, then you don’t have a resilience plan.

This week, let’s build on that since ‘testing’ is one of the MANY reasons that why I love disaster recovery as-a-service (DRaaS), where you fail over not to a second datacenter of yours but to cloud-hosted infrastructure – ideally, with managed service provider personnel helping you prepare before, recover during, and bounce back even stronger afterwards.

A few years ago, I surveyed organizations on how often they tested recovery-at-scale:

• Some were using a multi-datacenter approach (east to west) – and they averaged a test every 9 months.
• Those using DRaaS to fail over to cloud-hosted infrastructure averaged testing every 5 weeks.

Why was that? Because recovering to a cloud isn’t expensive to maintain, nor disruptive to production:

• You’re powering up secondary infrastructure for short window (and you aren’t paying for compute the rest of the time) – instead of maintaining secondary hardware when you might not need most of it on 27 days out of any month.

• You’re orchestrating recovery of workloads into a sandbox that doesn’t break the primary environment.  If you’re using orchestrated workflows well, then you’re orchestrating the assurance that identity works … network reconnections work … the applications are functional … and that outside users can connect and operate.
• If everything works, power it down.
• If everything didn’t work, document it and then power it down

• If you’re testing cyber resilience, this also lets you test your clean room or quarantine capabilities in infrastructure that wasn’t online until you pushed the button. Let’s repeat that, if your secondary infrastructure for Cyber or DR did not exist until you hit the big red button, that radically reduces the likelihood that it is infected. Unlike, if your users can easily get to your secondary datacenter, then so can the bad actors. 

This last one is the real difference between really good DRaaS and great CRaaS.

• Orchestrated recovery to secondary infrastructure is really good DR
• Orchestrated recovery that includes a clean room and quarantine workflows is great cyber resilience

So, that’s three reasons why I love DRaaS (and CRaaS) … and hopefully, now you do too.

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