DRaaS: Reliable Disaster Recovery with low RPO and RTO, the Easy Way

March 23rd, 2023


All businesses need to have a disaster recovery (DR) plan. Everyone knows storms can damage buildings (including the server room), cyberattacks can evade security measures, and people make mistakes that lead to data loss. The question becomes, how can a business recover its data and keep operations running? Unfortunately, some business leaders’ DR plan isn’t much more than taking chances and scrambling to recover data and systems if disaster strikes. Responsible leaders, however, have a well-orchestrated DR plan, tested and proven to restore data quickly, and more and more, they’re relying on Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).

What is DRaaS?

According to VMWare, DRaaS is a model that allows an organization to back up its data and replicate virtual IT infrastructure to a third-party provider’s computing environment.

DRaaS has several benefits. Most obviously, when you take advantage of a DRaaS offering, you don’t have to purchase, implement, and manage your own infrastructure to give your business disaster recovery capabilities. Additionally, that infrastructure isn’t at your site. So, if a natural disaster strikes at your facility or your IT systems are locked by ransomware, your data and virtual machines are safe – backups and replicas are at the service provider’s location.

However, another significant benefit is speed. DRaaS offerings enable you to meet your recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO).

  • RPO: The maximum amount of data your organization can lose based on the length between backups.
  • RTO: The maximum amount of time it takes to restore operations after a disaster

Some businesses can tolerate a few hours of lost time and lost data. However, those companies are growing fewer and further between. More organizations are digitally transforming their operations and depend on data to operate minute to minute. Your DRaaS provider can agree to service levels that ensure you have access to the data and systems you need to get back to business with minimal pain.

How Can Companies Leverage Veeam Replication for Disaster Recovery?

If you use virtual infrastructure, you need to remember that data backups are only a part of an effective disaster recovery strategy. Replication protects virtual machines so they can be restored and meet RPOs and RTOs.

Veeam Replication allows you to replicate a virtual machine in native VMware vSphere format, leveraging VMware vSphere snapshot capabilities. Veeam explains that you can think of that snapshot as a point in time that includes virtual disks, system state, and configuration. With replications as well as data backups, as often as every 15 minutes, your entire IT environment is available RTO and RPO if you must recover after a disaster.

If your RTO and RPO are based on seconds rather than quarter hours, you can take advantage of continuous data protection (CDP). CDP constantly replicates I/O operations on VMs, which results in near-zero data loss if a company needs to fail over to the replica.

The Easy Way to Complete, Reliable Disaster Recovery

Veeam Cloud Connect partners, like Virtual Systems, offer DRaaS, giving you a second site to store your Veeam backups and replicas easily. These providers also have the ability to spin up the resources you need quickly so that your business can recover in the event of a disaster.

Furthermore, Veeam Backup & Replication v12, which launched in February of 2023, has CDP enabled on the Cloud Connect partner’s infrastructure, enabling minimal RPOs and RTOs. This requires that Veeam Cloud Connect partners run VMware in a vCloud environment – and Virtual Systems is one of the select few that does.

Are you ready to implement DRaaS that gives you the assurance that you can recover your data backups and replicas with low RPOs and RTOs in an innovative way? Contact Virtual Systems, a provider positioned to make it happen.

Leave a Reply

Let's Talk

+