Use of Saas to Support Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

Let us look at the different ways in which cloud computing and SaaS can be employed for Disaster Recovery. This will be a review of the market available tools that can be used in different functions of Disaster Recovery. These days, another term has been coined a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) for the services that are used to support disaster recovery in an organization.

We need to define a few terms that would facilitate the better understanding of using SaaS and Cloud computing for Disaster Recovery as a service.

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO): RPO of a Disaster Recovery System is the latest backup of the data before any sort of incident or disaster affected the organization’s data center.
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO): RTO is defined as the minimum time the system would take to come back to the state of its original operations.

As mentioned earlier, the backup site for operations during disaster should not be in the same geographical condition, so that in case of a natural disaster, both the sites are not affected because of the same disaster.

Components of an efficient Disaster Recovery application:

For Data Backup & Recovery:

• The cloud storage is a very important aspect for any SaaS application to perform. A superior DR application would have a very strong backup. There are different types of options available for cloud to store and backup data. They are generally characterized by the protection and durability that they provide to the stored data. They are:

1. Standard Storage: It is the storage for data which has to constantly retrieved or accessed in order to maintain efficient operation of the business.  The data from the operational data store (ODS) would be backed up in the standard storage.
2. DRA Storage: DRA stands for Durable Reduced Availability. As the name suggests, this kind of backup is useful for the data whose access is rare but the storage and protection is of utmost information. A data mart may store its data in the DRA storage.
3. Cloud Storage Nearline: It is the cheapest type of cloud data backup available in the market. It is used to store the data that has not to be accessed frequently and at the same time it is not as critical as other types of data. This may include the analysis reports which have been used for interpretation etc.

• Failover and Failback: Following the traditional Disaster Recovery technique. It is very important to determine the time of the disaster and execute the failover plan to activate the operations in the backup site. And Failback is returning to the normal operations once the disaster has started to lose its effect on the operations. The planning for the transfer of any data created in the backup site is done by the Disaster Recovery Software. To do this, the software must be equipped with the cutting edge technology of Cloud SQL. Cloud SQL is the sequence query Language that can quickly replicate the data and help the organizations to relocate and resume its business operations. Currently, Cloud SQL is provided by Google Cloud Services as a part of their Disaster Recovery Solution package. It is a very effective way and efficient way. It is a very cost efficient tool which has to be employed depending upon the priority of the data. [Alhazmi & Malaiya, 2012]

Disaster Recovery Plan testing:

Let us see the Google Cloud Services options available for Recovery Plan testing and deployment. There are several useful tools that is provided by Google Cloud Services (Also by Amazon Web Services under different brand names. But the functions they provide are one and the same). These tools help in debugging, testing and deploying the plan.