Many enterprises interested in cloud technology make their first move in the area of disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). It is an attractive alternative to the capital investment that comes with a physical disaster recovery site. As the benefits of cloud solutions are appreciated, enterprises begin to consider a bigger move with infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Before making that shift, consider these four lessons that come from using DRaaS:

Assess Your Needs: When you embark on a shift to DRaaS, you’re forced to ask what you need to run your business and how much capacity and power are required. This is in contrast to on-site solutions, which enterprises equip by adding capacity and power as the new tools require it.

Before making a shift to the cloud, you need to assess your resource requirements. This assessment is easily conducted again when it’s time for shifting to IaaS. An assessment uncovers any deficiencies so that the migration is conducted in a controlled and safe process.

Think Broadly About Capabilities: DRaaS isn’t limited to only responding to disasters. It also provides an isolated copy of the environment that allows for sandboxing to test security upgrades and new hardware or software before they are used in your systems. You can use it to run scenarios to estimate the outcome of an infrastructure outage or determine whether a system change might cause unexpected problems.

Examine Performance and Costs: Once you have DRaaS implemented, it will help you determine how performance and capacity will be affected by a bigger infrastructure move to the cloud. You can predict what your costs will be and determine where you might see inefficiencies or added security risks. You’ll get a deep insight through DRaaS into what it will be like to do business in the cloud on a broader spectrum.

This is also a good way to test the connectivity and resilience of an infrastructure migration. If you see latency with your disaster recovery solution, you can plan to choose a data center that’s physically closer to your location for infrastructure.

Take the Fear Out of Migration: Many enterprises stare down a potential cloud migration with a bit of trepidation, but with a DRaaS solution, there’s time to work out any potential problems before a bigger shift. Planning how DRaaS will help you recover helps you ease into cloud-based technology and become comfortable with cloud-based management tools.

You’ll also get the opportunity to work with a cloud service provider and data centers, giving you more familiarity with issues like data sovereignty and cloud security. The process will help you to learn what is necessary for service level agreements (SLAs) with a cloud provider, helping your organization build confidence in working with a provider.

Implementing DRaaS helps you gain experience, but you’ll also get a better feel for when to deploy certain mission-critical applications based on how they interact with your business processes.

Potential Challenges: In any major transition, there will be challenges, but because all enterprises need a disaster recovery strategy, adopting DRaaS allows for IT to get comfortable with cloud solutions while protecting data and systems. In many cases, security teams debate the potential risks of turning over sensitive data to a third party that was previously stored on-site. It’s important to ensure standards, certifications, and compliance measures are all addressed with your provider.

The motivator for many enterprises is the opportunity to do more than just keep operations moving in a crisis. The benefit of DRaaS is that it also adds value by reducing costs and providing a path for safe future cloud investments.Considering a shift to DRaaS? Contact us at Access Tech, and we will help you navigate the process, from needs assessment to deployment.