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DRaaS vs. Backup and Recovery: Understanding the Differences

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Businesses that depend on their IT infrastructure face security, data loss, and service availability risks. Fortunately, there are tools and services to mitigate these risks and ensure that businesses are resilient in the face of cybercrime, human error, and natural disasters. 

Two of the most important risk mitigation services are backup and recovery solutions and disaster recovery solutions, often called Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) or virtual disaster recovery. 

Each has a role to play, but users should understand the differences between them, their benefits and drawbacks, and the contribution each makes to a comprehensive business continuity plan. 

What Is Backup and Recovery?

Backups are a fundamental disaster recovery tool. At its simplest, a backup is a copy of valuable data stored in a different location. If the original is deleted or corrupted, the backup can replace it. 

Modern cloud backup solutions make the process of maintaining secure offsite backups as simple as possible. They automatically and incrementally send data to a secure location over an encrypted connection. The backup is also encrypted at rest to prevent unauthorized access.

Backup users don’t have to buy or manage servers, worry about scaling, or concern themselves with compliance. The backup service vendor manages the hardware and software, ensuring that backups are up to date and easy to restore following an adverse event. 

What Is DRaaS?

Backup services are essential, but what happens when both data and hardware are unavailable? You can’t restore a backup to servers destroyed in a natural disaster or disconnected from the internet by a DDoS attack.

DRaaS is the solution. In addition to backing up data to an offsite location, disaster recovery services replicate the infrastructure, too. When a disaster hits one location, a failover system sends traffic to the DR location instead.

Until the last decade, true disaster recovery was only practical for large companies with big IT budgets. Buying and managing twice the infrastructure was an expensive proposition. To guarantee zero downtime, one redundant system may not be enough, so it was often even more expensive to provide disaster recovery for very sensitive systems. 

However, modern cloud DRaaS backs up data and uses cloud technology to provide on-demand infrastructure redundancy. If critical infrastructure is unavailable, DRaaS automatically spins up virtual servers, installs software, and copies data. Advanced DRaaS systems like our Virtual Disaster Recovery solution offer five-minute failovers and rapid recovery of bare-metal and virtual workloads. 

Considerations for Choosing the Right Solution

When choosing a backup or DRaaS solution, the most important considerations are the type of risk your company faces and how much of that risk you are prepared to accept. Offsite backup solutions offer valuable protection against risks that include hardware failure, accidental deletion, and ransomware attacks.

However, if you want to minimize risk and ensure that your business-critical services benefit from data and infrastructure redundancy, DRaaS may be the best option for your company. 

At Liberty Center One, we offer a range of secure offsite backup and recovery, DRaaS, and data protection solutions. Contact us today to find out how we can help your company minimize the risk of service disruption and keep critical services up and running.

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