DRaaS is the low-cost insurance policy for 'always-on' IT

Disaster. The term itself inspires worry and downright fear for most IT pros -- and for good reason. Whether it’s a security breach, networking failure, human error or the much-dreaded natural disaster, outages can be financially devastating for IT-centric businesses. While acts of nature are rare, IT failures are inevitable, and most companies experience them multiple times every year.

Despite the pervasive risks, close to 75 percent of companies are failing in their disaster readiness efforts, according to the Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council. How you prepare for this scenario and what continuity solution you choose for recovery will determine if your outages lasts for minutes, hours or days.

Concerns about disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) can be especially stressful for small and mid-sized businesses. After all, these companies don’t have the resources available to create a business resiliency plan that relies on a secondary data center or expensive outsourced provider. With IT teams stretched to the limit and no spare resources to focus beyond day-to-day operational tasks, even one outage could put a real dent in -- or even worse, destroy -- a small business.

With today’s always-on, IT-centric business requirements, being unprepared to quickly recover services isn’t a viable option anymore. So what can IT teams do to avoid the high price tag, complexity and resource requirements of traditional DR/BC solutions? Take a look at new disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) designed for the public cloud.

Following are some key considerations companies should keep in mind when contemplating public cloud-based DRaaS solutions and providers.

DRaaS is budget friendly

The latest public-cloud based DRaaS solutions bring business resiliency within reach of organizations of every size. It’s important to read the fine print, though. DRaaS is a hot area, and the category is sometimes misused to describe cloud backup as well as the traditional high-end outsourced DR/BC providers.

Instead, look for a public cloud-based solution that includes backup, replication, disaster recovery and business continuity. You have to keep running and be able to quickly restore your operations if your primary site isn’t available. The sophistication, scale and low price points of the public cloud will provide the most compelling DRaaS capabilities for most IT shops.

You can customize your DRaaS solution

No two businesses are alike, so it follows that no two IT shops have the exact same DR/BC needs. With the right DRaaS solution, companies can customize services to include the optimal features and managed services to support individualized business needs. With public cloud-based DRaaS, you can easily customize capabilities as your requirements change over time.

Moreover, a public cloud-based DRaaS solution lets companies run workloads as long as needed and then migrate back on site in an automated fashion when the time is right. This flexibility is very important when an outage affects a large portion of your data center resources.

Finally, you need to be confident that the DRaaS provider has enough capacity to support broad-based regional failures. The safest bet is to seek solutions that utilize public cloud infrastructure with effectively infinite scale.

Managed services provide DRaaS expertise

Implementing an effective DR/BC plan requires specialized skills that most operations teams lack. In addition, introducing a cloud-based infrastructure creates new complexities in the environment. Sorting out these DRaaS deployment issues can be time consuming for an IT staff without experience in this area.

The right DRaaS partner will help you economically and efficiently deploy your cloud-based DR/BC environment and give you the skills you need to quickly make the deployment a success. In addition to initial implementation, your DRaaS partner should be able to offer services like monitoring and automated testing, so you can be confident that a recovery will be smooth when the next outage happens.

While the phrase "disaster" brings to mind hurricanes and floods, we all know that IT disasters happen every day. Ignoring the possibility -- or probability -- that one day your company will be faced with unexpected downtime is just bad business when affordable solutions are within reach. DRaaS offers a great alternative for those wary of the cost and complexity of traditional disaster recovery solutions but who are ready to face the new reality of always-on IT.

Photo Credit: Olivier Le Moal/Shutterstock

Oded Haner, chief technology officer of HotLink Corporation and former chief information offer of Monster Cable, has extensive experience in developing and implementing IT technologies and overhauling corporate IT architecture to help companies adopt new on-premise and cloud-based infrastructure.