Important questions about DRaaS you’re not asking your vendor

At some point after a disaster, an organization will repair or get a new primary data center. It should therefore know how it will execute failback. Unless the organization is comfortable keeping its applications in the cloud permanently, it needs a method to move data back on premises after a disaster has occurred. If the disaster destroys the data center, a full recovery is required.

This means moving a potentially large amount of data across the relatively small bandwidth of an internet connection. With DRaaS, however, a customer can continue to run its environment in the provider’s cloud until the restoration to the new data center is complete. During the replication time, the customer is likely to incur a surcharge for using the provider’s compute resources, so completing this task as quickly as possible is essential.

You should look for DRaaS providers that can bulk ship a baseline set of data and then sync just data changes after recovering the baseline data set.

A more common outcome is when a disaster affects only part of the data center or the declaration turns out to be a false alarm. In these situations, a customer needs the ability to do a smart compare between the primary data center and the cloud data center. The goal is to send only the data that changed while production was running in the cloud. Having to resort to a full recovery when most of the data is in-place is unacceptable.