There has been tremendous growth in the adoption of the cloud across IT companies. Diverse deployment models are being adopted across different verticals. While some companies choose public cloud, the companies concerned about their security are still reluctant to shift completely to the public cloud model. The hybrid cloud deployment model remains one of the most adopted or highly acceptable cloud-deployment models.

The hybrid cloud deployment model remains one of the most adopted or highly acceptable cloud-deployment models.

Leveraging the cloud model has improvised the IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS IT-service models. This has led to the development of strategies, which are more agile, on-demand and aligned with IT vertical services to meet business demands and customer experience as part of the globalized DR and business-continuity strategy.

Considering the current trend in the industry, all enterprises are expanding their businesses and infrastructure globally for hosting services by leveraging on-premises, hybrid, or multi-cloud public cloud services. Though the wide adoption of cloud services opens the doors and reachability to the customer for new opportunities and business revenue, it also poses new challenges to the IT operations and infrastructure team. Unforeseen downtime, vendor lock-in, control, and security are some of the major issues with the implementation of cloud services. This has been an area of concern for quite long, and still, there is no solution to address them with the traditional approach.

The most popular use cases that IT companies are adopting for their business-critical services using the private, public or hybrid cloud environments are:

• DR and business continuity for business resiliency and DR compliance requirement.
• Data archival for long-term protection.
• Application migration and archival for legacy application decommissioning.
• ECM solution with big data and analytic analysis /reporting and for hosting DevOps application for testing and hosting.

Making Business More Secure and Resilient

DRaaS on the hybrid cloud, on one hand, allows us to leverage public cloud availability, agility, and cost-effective infrastructure resources. On the other, private cloud infrastructure enables us to control, secure, and protect workloads critical to the organization. It offers a platform wherein the organization can leverage cloud platform to host services leveraging cost-effective solutions with on-demand scalability and high availability.

For protection and DR, business continuity plan workloads can be seamlessly migrated or replicated across sites to ensure proactive management. This enables resiliency, protection, compliance, secured, and high availability for DR scenarios. DRaaS solutions protect businesses by replicating critical servers, operating systems, applications, and end-user data to a cloud platform or datacenters with one-to-many relations across sites or hybrid cloud model leveraging multi-cloud protection to ensure high availability across service providers or sites.

The next-generation business demands have transformed the overall meaning and DR strategy with a more efficient service continuity plan. DR Strategies measured by the quality of experience (external/end-customer experience) have a direct impact on revenue and profitability associated with the quality of service. Under such a service strategy, business resilience plan will ensure that it covers and operates even when a critical piece of infrastructure fails and the time taken to bring back the infrastructure in place. This is unlike the traditional DR strategy focused toward internal client with server or individual layer level recovery.

DRaaS has simplified the overall planning and preparation of the DR Strategy to align different workloads with a customized policy under different automated and orchestrated workflow recovery plan under different disaster recovery SLA objectives, which can be managed through a single interface. This enables the customer to view information on the DR health of the entire IT estate and helps role-based access control (RBAC) to perform manual or automatic or DRY-run DR drill using a single-click control.

The use of DRaaS in a hybrid environment eliminates the capital expenditure involved in building and maintaining a secondary site for DR. It also provides flexibility and offers virtually limitless storage capacity. However, the endless variety of options and the buzz around DRaaS leaves businesses uncertain as to whether it is a good fit for their infrastructure. This is the reason DRaaS can be a turning point for many organizations.