Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is better than traditional ways of managing DR. And that is an indisputable fact. It’s cheaper, more flexible and easier to test. But there’s also much more to it than that. For many organisations, DRaaS is also the first step into Azure and exploring the benefits of cloud.

Here are a few reasons why:

Revolutionising Dev/Test

Traditionally Dev/Test has been the poor relation of IT – living on the offcuts of the live production environment. Production infrastructure is refreshed, and when the new hardware comes in, the legacy kit is used for Dev/Test. The result is that Dev/Test of new systems and upgrades takes place in an environment that’s one step behind the real thing.

With DRaaS enabled through Azure Site Recovery (ASR), all that changes. You have the capability to mirror your live production environment at any time and for as long as you need – so why not use it for more accurate and reliable Dev/Test? Many organisations now do. In fact, some of our DRaaS customers have decided that they don’t need a separate Dev/Test environment at all. They just use the cloud.

Delivering high availability

Vendors usually recommend that high availability requires having two sets of servers for everything. This is a very expensive way of doing things. With a DRaaS solution this architecture is not necessary. Most organisations can simply failover to a mirror of the servers you have in the cloud (which you get by default with ASR) whenever needed. The cost is around 10% of the cost of a traditional high availability set up. It’s another step towards cloud, and another demonstration of the cost and efficiency savings you can achieve.

Coping with seasonal demand

What a lot of organisations don’t consider with DRaaS is that they can use it to cope with increases in seasonal demand. For example, a retailer may only need three servers for 11 months of the year but then need another five around Christmas. The same might apply to an events company handling ticketing for a yearly festival, a florist chain gearing up for Valentine’s Day, or any business running a competition or a major promotion. With DRaaS you can send applications and workloads to the cloud temporarily and easily cope with those surges in demand.

Altogether, these benefits create added value that is simply not possible through traditional DR methods. Often, the benefits are so clear that businesses who have experienced DRaaS take the decision to undertake a full migration to the cloud.

Download our paper on the business case for DRaaS to learn how DR can be your springboard to creating new business value from the cloud.