Disaster Recovery as a Service vs. Traditional Backups: Which is Best for Your Business?

By: Chris Chandler, Solutions Engineer, DataBank

Digitized data is more critical than ever to the successful operation of businesses. Companies need data to drive operations, serve customers, and remain competitive. With threats such as cyberattacks, natural disasters, and hardware failures, businesses must implement data-loss mitigation solutions to ensure continued business success.

Two popular solutions for protecting data are Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and Traditional Backups. While both are primarily used to protect data, they differ significantly in functionality, cost, and speed of recovery. Understanding these differences is important when choosing the right solution for your business.

What is Traditional Backup?

Traditional backup involves regularly copying data to a storage medium or cloud storage service. The primary goal is to create a copy of data that can be restored in case of accidental deletion, corruption, infection or system failure. Traditional backups can be performed using various methods, including:

• Full Backup: Copies all selected data at once, ensuring a complete restore point.
• Incremental Backup: Saves only the changes made since the last backup, reducing storage needs and backup time.
• Differential Backup: Similar to incremental backup, but it saves all changes since the last full backup, requiring more space but faster recovery than incremental backups.

Businesses often use backup software or hardware appliances to automate backup processes. These backups can be stored onsite (local backup) or offsite (cloud or tape backup) to protect against physical damage or theft. There are also additional options of storing the backups in immutable storage, which protects specifically against encryption from Ransomware attacks.

Removable media is also an option where the media the backups are stored on are removed periodically from the Production Environment. This adds a layer of protection against internal bad-actors or people physically stealing or altering data.

What is DRaaS?

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is a cloud-based solution that provides businesses with a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. Unlike traditional backups, which focus solely on data storage, DRaaS replicates an entire IT infrastructure, including applications, servers, and configurations. In the event of a disaster, businesses can quickly switch to the replicated environment with minimal downtime.

Differences Between DRaaS and Traditional Backups

Recovery Speed and Business Continuity

One of the most significant differences between DRaaS and traditional backups is the speed of recovery.

• Traditional Backup: Restoring data from backups can be a time-consuming process, especially if large volumes of data are involved. If backups are stored offsite, retrieval can take hours or even days, leading to extended downtime.
• DRaaS: Databank offers near-instant recovery by switching operations to a replicated cloud DR Site. Customers can maintain productivity with minimal disruption, making DRaaS a required choice for businesses that cannot afford downtime.

Management

• Traditional Backup: Requires businesses to manage backup schedules, ensure proper storage management, and handle restoration manually when needed.
• DRaaS: Is automated and managed by Databank. Our DRaaS solutions include annual failover testing, automated updates, and real-time replication to ensure seamless recovery.

Cost

• Traditional Backup: Typically has lower initial costs since businesses can have differing needs for data retention and storage type and locations. Costs can add up quickly depending on needs.
• DRaaS: Databank DRaaS is often much more cost-effective than traditional backups as the compute resources are reserved and not used unless a disaster is declared by the customer. This lowers power consumption and resource utilization, helping keep costs down.

Scalability

• Traditional Backup: Scaling backup storage requires additional investments in hardware or cloud storage, which may not be as flexible.
• DRaaS: Databank offers essentially limitless scalability, allowing businesses to adjust resources as needed without major capital expenditures. It also supports hybrid environments, enabling integration with existing On-Prem or collocated IT environments.

Which is Best for Your Business?

Choosing between DRaaS and traditional backup depends on your business needs, budget, and recovery objectives. Here are some items to consider:

When to Choose Traditional Backup

• You have non-critical applications that can tolerate some downtime.
• You have an in-house IT team that can manage backup and restoration processes.
• Your budget is limited, and you prefer a more cost-effective solution.

When to Choose Databank DRaaS

• Your business requires high availability and minimal downtime.
• You run mission-critical applications that need rapid recovery in case of failure.
• You want a fully managed disaster recovery solution without adding staff, capital expenditure or increased workload.

Final Thoughts from the Solutions Engineer

DRaaS and traditional backups have important, but distinctly different roles in data protection. Traditional backup offers a straightforward and cost-effective way to store data, Databank DRaaS provides a quicker and more functional recovery solution. Businesses must assess their risk tolerance, operational requirements, and budget to determine the proper solution.

The Hybrid Approach: (My recommendation)

Most businesses will adopt a hybrid approach, combining both traditional backup and DRaaS for layered protection.
This means using traditional backups for regular data archiving while leveraging DRaaS for business-critical services.
At the end of the day, backups and DR should be recognized for what they are; technical insurance against significant data-loss and/or lost revenue due to a major IT systems outage.

Choose your coverage appropriately.