The nightmare is reality: Your system was breached, and your entire business is down. The team is working tirelessly to get back up and running, but disaster recovery wasn’t a priority for the business before now. It was constantly put on the back burner for “next year’s budget.” With no plan in place, your team is scrambling to pick up the pieces, and costs are mounting by the minute—$300,000 per hour, to be exact.

Less than 7% of companies can get fully back online in less than one day, and 34% of organizations take a month to recover from ransomware. Backup and disaster recovery matter more than ever, and the stakes are too high to risk losing data and information permanently.

Businesses have several options to choose from for disaster recovery. Traditional backup is a common practice where data is copied and stored on physical hard drives or servers. Cloud-based Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is a modern alternative with advanced capabilities like failover and journaling.

This guide will review the key differences between traditional backup and DRaaS, the pros and cons, and how to choose what’s right for your organization.

What Is Traditional Backup?

Traditional backup makes physical copies of data and stores them in an on-premise or off-site server. The goal is to make critical data retrievable immediately after loss, and storing it physically protects it from corruption, deletion, or failure.

How It Works

Traditional backup works with on-premise tape, disk, or cloud backups for periodic data protection and long-term storage. The standard process includes scheduled snapshots, periodic backups, and manual restoration when needed. It’s a fairly hands-on process typically performed by internal IT teams who manage backup schedules and perform restoration.

What It's Best For

Traditional backup is best for meeting compliance requirements, saving infrequently accessed data, or protecting non-critical systems. Industries such as government, manufacturing, education, legal, and accounting are ideal candidates for traditional backup.

Here are a few other specific scenarios:

• A healthcare organization archives old patient records
• A higher education university backs up historical student data, such as grades and coursework
• A manufacturing organization stores non-mission-critical data for machine log records
• A small business on a tight budget that doesn’t have much significant data

Pros of Traditional Backup

Lower upfront cost, control, and simplicity are common pros of traditional backups. It’s inexpensive to copy information, and organizations feel secure when they have physical control of assets. A small-scale data center costs around $1,000 per square foot, and large centers typically incur annual operating costs from $10 million to $25 million.

• Lower upfront costs: Especially with the existing on-premise infrastructure, traditional backups are typically less expensive in terms of upfront investment. Organizations can gradually add storage, and there are no additional service fees.
• More control: Organizations have direct access and control over physical assets, which can provide greater peace of mind. Especially in highly regulated industries, businesses might appreciate the security of having assets physically in sight.
• Simple workflow: For basic needs, traditional backups are fairly straightforward. It’s not extremely complex to snapshot data and store it appropriately. Teams might also be used to this workflow and perform it easily within their normal day-to-day operations.

Cons of Traditional Backup

Longer downtime, slower recovery, and manual effort are common cons of traditional backups. Imagine bringing systems online after a ransomware attack where an IT admin has to locate the correct version and manually restore files across an entire system. For large organizations, this could realistically take weeks and is extremely susceptible to human error.

• Longer downtime: Every minute of downtime is extremely expensive, and the average data breach costs $4.4 million. The true cost of downtime has inched as high as $9,000 per minute for large organizations. Every hour systems are offline, costs add up.
• Slower recovery: If a human IT admin is physically restoring files from a backup, this can significantly delay the return to business-as-usual operations. This also creates a ripple effect throughout the organization; systems are slow to come back online, customers aren’t serviced, the sales pipeline dries up, and revenue starts to take a major hit.
• Increased manual effort: The recovery process with traditional backups is extremely manual and time-consuming. It might even involve bringing on temporary IT staff or an outside vendor to support. Even working extremely long hours, humans have to take breaks, extending the recovery process.

What Is DRaaS?

DRaaS is a third-party solution that provides data protection and disaster recovery on demand, over the Internet, and on a pay-as-you-go basis. The goal is to protect data and applications during any type of disaster.

DRaaS evolved from traditional backups, but became a popular option because it goes beyond basic data recovery. While traditional backups simply restore copies of data, DRaaS is built for a full system recovery with automated failover and instant recovery times, and it’s powered by reliable cloud-based infrastructure.

How It Works

DRaaS works to replicate and host servers in a third-party vendor facility. This infrastructure serves as the disaster recovery site when any type of incident occurs: a natural disaster, power outage, cyber attack, and more.

Often, DRaaS provides fast IT recovery that minimizes downtime and supports business continuity. With backups constantly occurring, systems are immediately back online and updated to the latest versions.

What It's Best For

DRaaS protects sensitive industries where downtime or service disruption is nonnegotiable. For example, finance, manufacturing, and healthcare organizations could have critical failures that impact patients, global supply chains, and world banking. It’s also best for highly regulated industries with complex IT environments.

Take a look at a few other specific example scenarios:

• A mid-sized SaaS platform with thousands of customers and an outsourced IT team
• A highly regulated online payment provider that stores credit card information, account details, and transaction data
• A fully remote retail chain with dozens of franchises across a geographic region

Key Components

Key components of DRaaS include Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). These are two critical measurements that shape an organization’s disaster recovery plan.

• RPO: Refers to the point in the past to which a business will recover. It’s the longest period of time in which data might be lost due to a disaster, measuring how much recent work your business can afford to lose.
• RTO: Refers to the point in time in the future when a business will be up and running again. This is the maximum amount of time your business can tolerate being offline before operations must be restored to avoid significant disruptions.

Pros of DRaaS

DRaaS quickly became a popular continuity alternative for modern businesses that want to minimize disruptions and reduce the severity of a disaster. DRaaS recovers operations extremely quickly, is scalable across a large organization, and often offers access to expert management services through a third-party provider.

• Fast recovery: With DRaaS, recovery happens in minutes instead of days. It’s built for near-instant failover to the replicated cloud environment. For example, when a power outage happens during a hurricane, a healthcare provider in Florida doesn’t even need to do anything for systems to immediately return online. This ensures doctors can access records, medication is distributed, and life-saving machines remain operational.
• Access to expert-managed services: DRaaS solutions often include 24/7/365 support from a managed services provider (MSP). This expert outside resource can also support ongoing management during disaster recovery, and it reduces the reliance and burden on internal IT teams. Plus, MSPs are specialized in disaster recovery and know exactly how to manage compliance and handle procedures.
• Scalability: DRaaS skills with a business as it grows, without the need for new hardware or an expansion in an existing on-premise data center. For example, even if a manufacturer opens a new location in Mexico, DRaaS seamlessly adapts without major architectural changes, confidently securing the new location.

Cons of DRaaS

Common complaints of DRaaS are higher costs, vendor reliance, and integration issues. DRaaS is not without its challenges, and businesses must weigh the trade-offs.

• Higher costs: DRaaS may come with increased costs from monthly service or usage fees. For small businesses, this might result in sticker shock compared to the fixed cost of traditional backups.
• Vendor reliance: Businesses using DRaaS give up some level of control. They must trust a third-party provider to manage failover and recovery. For some organizations, that can be a major shift from having full control and visibility in-house.

Integration challenges: It also might be a bigger upfront lift to integrate DRaaS with legacy technology. Specialized workloads may not be optimized for cloud-based infrastructure, and implementation could require time, specialized skills, and budget. For example, a decades-old financial advisor might have complex, custom-built software that houses decades of records. For DRaaS, it won’t be as simple as replicating that onto a cloud server. It might involve replatforming, which is a larger cloud-based migration project.

Core Differences Between Traditional Backup and DRaaS

We’ve discussed the pros and cons of each disaster recovery model as well as what type of company might benefit the most from one solution or the other.

Now, take a look at a quick snapshot of the core differences between traditional backups and DRaaS.

How to Choose the Right Backup Solution

Choosing the right backup solution for your business means assessing your risk tolerance, internal IT resources, regulatory needs, workforce location, and budget. Disaster recovery is no longer a nice-to-have, so it’s crucial to fit this service within your IT budget.

1. Measure your organization’s risk tolerance, along with regulatory and compliance needs.

First, assess the risk tolerance and regulatory needs of your organization. Ask some of the questions below, and align stakeholders on how much risk you’re willing to handle.

• How mission-critical are all of your business systems?
• Are some systems less sensitive?
• Do you need to provide immutable, detailed audit logs for compliance requirements?
• What are your baseline RTO and RPO metrics?

2. Assess your internal expertise.

Disaster recovery is its own complete service, and internal IT teams may not have hands-on experience in real-world disaster scenarios. Consider staff headcount, technology resources, and even support such as a media or PR team. This will help you decide if you can contain, coordinate, and restore business operations quickly with just your in-house employees.

For example, in high-pressure, high-stakes scenarios, a small IT team might be quickly overwhelmed by leadership demands, customer complaints, or even media outreach. With DRaaS, a coordinated, expert team can do the heavy lifting on recovery while internal teams provide support.

3. Consider monthly budget changes and total cost of ownership.

Analyze your annual, quarterly, and monthly budget to understand your existing spending on disaster recovery and whether you have any margin for new services. A traditional backup process might already be a line item in your IT budget, or you might have room for a new DRaaS subscription. Consider the variable costs of DRaaS, and any seasonal demands that might quickly skyrocket costs. Include cost estimates for infrastructure, software, and employee time.

• What are the current costs of your existing disaster recovery solution?
• What other backup and business continuity plans are in place?
• Does executive leadership understand that disaster recovery is a priority?

Depending on your budget, a tiered DRaaS solution could be an option; this covers critical systems only and allows you to maintain traditional, more cost-efficient backups for older data. A budget-conscious organization might prioritize based on critical operations, or a budget reallocation might make sense if your business is slowly migrating away from legacy infrastructure. Also, cloud cost optimization might be easier if everything is centralized and easily accessible.

4. Analyze the geographic distribution of your workforce.

A robust disaster recovery system needs to cover anywhere you have a headquarters or where employees are located. Consider if you have infrastructure in places where natural disasters occur, such as wildfires, tornadoes, or hurricanes. For a completely distributed workforce, make sure you have solutions set up for every endpoint and a way to communicate if systems go down.

Consider the location of your IT team as well. For example, for an offshore IT team, it might be the middle of the night when hurricane winds knock out one of your data centers. However, a dispersed DRaaS team might easily be able to hop in as they’re not in the disaster zone. Analyze the overall physical footprint of your organization to understand how expansive coverage should be.

Consider a Hybrid Recovery Model for the Best of Both Worlds

Many modern businesses turn to hybrid cloud solutions when it comes to their cloud infrastructure management and disaster recovery. Hybrid solutions often offer the best of both worlds. For example, in cloud implementation, it allows critical workloads to stay on private cloud while leveraging public cloud servers for more scalable and flexible workloads.

Similarly, in the disaster recovery world, businesses can use traditional backups for low-priority systems while implementing DRaaS for immediate, responsive disaster response. For example, healthcare providers need HIPAA compliant cloud hosting, which means systems need an immediate failover solution. A tiered approach allows for a slow migration, slower cost increase, and fewer disruptions to your team’s existing processes.

RapidScale’s DRaaS for Leading Businesses

For thousands of businesses needing a modern, rapid approach to disaster recovery, RapidScale DRaaS protects critical business assets and customer data, leveraging cutting-edge technology and unmatched expertise for compliance support, business continuity, and reduced downtime.

Our team offers a suite of managed cloud services built to achieve demanding Recovery Point and Recovery Time Objectives, including Backup as a Service, monitoring, Infrastructure as a Service, and Security as a Service

Plus, RapidScale is comprehensive and robust, offering industry-leading features

• Tier 3 data centers with SSAE 18 certification
• NetApp all-flash, encrypted storage
• VMware ESXi hypervisor
• Encrypted and unlimited data transfers
• Data compression
• Multiple recovery points
• 4-hour RTO, near real-time RPO
• Block-level replication
• Hardware, storage, application, and hypervisor-independent automated failover

Recovery With Failover

A mission-critical system, Recovery with Failover offers built-in orchestration and automation that allows businesses to define workflows for live failovers and failover tests, enabling push-button disaster recovery. A failover server is chosen based on your preferences, and businesses only pay for what they use. This also eliminates the expensive overhead of cooling, maintaining, and equipping an on-premise redundancy center.

Work With RapidScale for Your Ideal Backup Solution

Depending on your business, traditional backups maintain control and can simplify workflow. However, many modern businesses turned to DRaaS for its flexibility, capability, and extremely fast recovery time. In a world where every minute of downtime becomes harder to handle and more expensive, it’s difficult to handle a disaster, even for low-risk businesses.

Whether you want to migrate from traditional backups to DRaaS or you’re looking to switch vendors, RapidScale offers a variety of solutions that tackle everything from common IT problems to extremely specialized issues. Whether you’re exploring Backup as a Service or DRaaS, our team of experts can guide you through the right choice for your business and handle the project every step of the way. Book a DRaaS consultation with RapidScale to assess your organization’s readiness.