There was a time when companies were nervous about trusting the cloud to store sensitive data. Now organizations are moving their mission-critical systems and data to the cloud. Recovery Ahead Sign Board

Technology researchers at Gartner predicted that both disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) implementations will grow an astonishing 200% by 2020. But what is driving this growth?

Disaster recovery in the cloud is part of a larger trend towards reliance on cloud services. The trend illustrates a growing confidence in cloud security and reliability along with an understanding of the overall affordability of cloud services.

Here are some of the main drivers behind the DRaaS market:

Cost-effective and Scalable Secondary Recovery Sites

Traditional disaster recovery solutions require your business to duplicate its data center environment in a separate geographical location. Off-site backup and recovery is supposed to ensure that any disaster that affects your production environment will likely spare your secondary site.

With DRaaS, there is no need to provision and implement additional hardware infrastructure. The cloud provider is responsible for providing any necessary computing and software as well as required upgrades and patches. Your company only pays for what you need, when you need it.  As your production environment changes, your cloud DR site scales along with it.

Ability to Meet RTO and RPO Objectives

Outages can be crippling for companies, shutting down production and leaving customers and clients in the lurch. Recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) must be extremely fast to preserve business continuity. DRaaS provides continuous replication so your business can achieve immediate availability after an incident. Unlike a nightly backup where you can lose as much as 24 hours of data, continuous data protection ensures that you meet your RPOs.  Most importantly, you’ll never have to explain to your CEO why the file she created that day is lost forever.  With DRaaS you’ll be able to recover to the point in time right before the incident occurred, minimizing any potential loss of data.

Access to Enterprise-level Disaster Recovery and Expertise

DRaaS shouldn’t be confused with cloud-based DR. Beyond providing the necessary infrastructure, DRaaS is a complete DR solution, including the necessary software and computing, DR planning, testing and access to experts.

With DRaaS, your company gains access to an entire team of experts that manage and monitor the cloud environment on your behalf.  The experts at your cloud provider can also offer migration and project management expertise to take you through planning, implementation, and management of DRaaS.

Finding Peace of Mind With DRaaS

Back in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy hit New York and New Jersey, many companies that had selected DR providers close to their primary data center suffered a double loss when both facilities were knocked out by the same storm. For example, the Huffington Post website went dark when their provider in Manhattan was flooded by Sandy. Other areas of the country, such as New England, experienced power outages and damaging winds, which also created DR issues.

By choosing FirstLight’s DRaaS solution, your company gains access to a geographically-redundant cloud, hosted in data centers that are located a reasonable distance from your on-site environment – close enough to drive to, but far enough away to avoid localized issues. FirstLight also operates an extensive fiber optic network in the region, with redundant connectivity via routes that avoid major urban areas that could be problematic in a weather catastrophe.

Don’t wait until it’s too late to take your DR to the cloud. Reach out to FirstLight today.