8 Steps to Ensure DRaaS is Implemented Successfully

April 20, 2016 / General Discussion

Planning to activate disaster recovery as a service? That’s a crucial step for your business. Evaluating the business requirements for DR by revising the business impact analysis (BIA) results that identify mission-critical IT assets. And data is important prior to applying for DR as a service. Through the results of BIA, you can get specified recovery time objectives (RTOs). And recovery point objectives (RPOs) for your mission-critical IT assets.

Ensure that the vendor is an expert and is able to support your RTOs and RPOs. After the evaluation, analyze data and determine the tasks of the DR as a service vendor – for instance – server backup, data backup, DR plan development, or DR plan testing.

After the verification that the DRaaS vendor supportive of your requirements implement. The below eight steps for ensuring DR as a service is implemented properly in your organization –

  1. Start with phased migration to DR as a service. For instance, migrate databases, applications, and data to the service for a few months. And utilize that time to examine vendor support.
  2. Verification of the vendor data centers used for your business in terms of complying with regulations and standards. Like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and ISO 27001. NIST Special Publication 800-34.
  3. Also, it’s essential to find out whether the DRaaS vendor permits limited access to your data. And whether data integrity is protected. Discover what would be the consequences of data loss or corruption.
  4. Define if the servers and other devices used for your computing environment dedicated to your enterprise. Check if the vendor houses data from several users on servers.
  5. Create service-level agreements and emergency remediation, if the provider is unable to complete its SLA obligations.
  6. Don’t miss to reap the benefits of all the available DR testing and plan development resources for making sure that your DR plan is appropriate and will work when needed.
  7. View the details on DR as a service vendor staff to check out who is managing your infrastructure. Observe the credentials and references.
  8. Research on the planning of the vendor for managing the infrastructure security, including antivirus, encryption, firewalls, and intrusion prevention systems.

So, don’t miss to check these steps prior to opting for a DR as a Service plan.