In today’s connected, always-on world, unplanned downtime caused by a disaster can exact substantial tolls on your business from a cost, productivity, and customer experience perspective. Investing in a robust disaster recovery program upfront can save considerable costs down the road.

Unfortunately, many businesses learn this lesson the hard way. According to FEMA, nearly a quarter of businesses never re-open following a major disaster—a sobering statistic.[i]

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way. Disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) eliminates hefty capital expenditures and additional staff needed to maintain traditional, owned disaster recovery infrastructure. Instead, this cloud-based, scalable solution helps businesses quickly resume critical operations following a disaster—often within mere seconds.

The many virtues of DRaaS

Disasters come in many forms: cyber-attacks, equipment failures, fires, power outages—basically anything that can take down your systems. Without a robust disaster recovery plan in place, it can take days, weeks, or even months to recover.

Unfortunately, time and budgetary constraints often mean disaster recovery efforts get put on the back burner where they languish. Many companies have not defined their recovery point objectives (RPOs) and their recovery time objectives (RTOs), and data classification have fallen by the wayside. Once a disaster strikes, recovery efforts take far longer, and in some cases, businesses may not ever fully recover.

DRaaS uses the cloud to back up and safeguard applications and data from a disaster. DRaaS takes a tiered approach to disaster recovery, using pre-defined or customized RPOs and RTOs to provide the right level of backup and recovery from edge to cloud. This ensures business-critical applications and data get recovered quickly. DRaaS also accommodates your required service levels based on data classification, mapping them to the most appropriate recovery strategy.

DRaaS streamlines disaster recovery planning and support, freeing staff to support your core business. It can grow and scale with your business. Furthermore, DRaaS saves money over the long term, providing a more cost-effective alternative to in-house disaster recovery programs with owned and self-managed equipment. Ultimately, DRaaS minimizes data loss and downtime, simplifies operations, and reduces risk in a cost-effective, customizable, and scalable way.

Get started with DRaaS

Protect your mission-critical data and applications with DRaaS. GDT can help you deploy DRaaS from edge to cloud using Zerto on HPE GreenLake. This DRaaS solution leverages journal-based continuous data protection and ultra-fast recovery for your applications and data. Scalable, automated data management capabilities simplify workload and data mobility across clouds. Zerto features down-to-the-second (or synchronous) RPOs, industry-leading RTOs, and edge-to-cloud flexibility.

Whether you need file-level, app-level, or site-level recovery, GDT can simplify data classification and match it with the proper disaster recovery level or service. GDT not only handles the technology, but we also help you determine the best approach based on your business needs, turning technology conversations into business conversations that help ensure the continuity of your business when a disaster happens.

To learn more about implementing DRaaS, talk to one of GDT’s disaster recovery specialists.

[i] FEMA, “Stay in business after a disaster by planning ahead,” found at: https://www.fema.gov/press-release/20210318/stay-business-after-disaster-planning-ahead (accessed Nov. 21, 2022)