What is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

In detail: What is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

Backup gets your data back. DRaaS keeps your systems running during an outage, and many organisations need both. Backup as a Service stores your data but reserves no compute, so restoring whole systems means first finding somewhere to run them. DRaaS keeps that place ready: compute, memory and replica storage are reserved for you in advance, so recovery is planned rather than best-effort. Typical scenarios include primary site failure, extended power outages, ransomware recovery and facility-level disasters.

What the service includes:

• VM-to-VM replication for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V
• Reserved recovery capacity, sized to the vCPU, RAM and disk of each protected server
• Failover of single VMs or whole groups, and controlled failback
• Isolated recovery environments for safe DR testing
• Tenant isolation, with Veeam Cloud Connect allocating compute, storage and network resources per customer
• An optional hosted firewall VDOM for VPN access into the DR site

Physical servers are not replicated. They are protected with Backup as a Service, and in a disaster their backups are restored into new virtual machines in the FirstNet DR environment, with a longer recovery time than replicated VMs. If your servers already run in FirstNet Private Cloud, the equivalent is Geographic Disaster Recovery to a second FirstNet data centre in another city, with its own DR firewall.

You choose how much of the work FirstNet carries. With Platform-Only DRaaS, FirstNet provides the DR infrastructure, reserved capacity, replication tenancy and platform support, and your team runs replication, failover and failback from your own Veeam console. Managed DR adds replica monitoring, quarterly test restores, reporting and, depending on tier, runbooks and assisted failover and failback. Managed DR needs Veeam licensing supplied by FirstNet, while Platform-Only works with your own licences.

In a DR event the steps are the same each time:

• Declare: you confirm the event and which systems need to be recovered
• Fail over: replicas start in the FirstNet DR site, started by you or assisted by FirstNet
• Connect: users and administrators reach recovered systems through the agreed secure access model
• Operate and fail back: systems run from DR while your primary site is restored, then return under change control

What you still decide is which systems matter most and how fast they must return. FirstNet runs DR readiness workshops that tier applications as gold, silver or bronze and set a recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for each. These are design targets, and firm commitments apply only when explicitly contracted after scoping and testing. FirstNet recommends quarterly DR tests for critical systems and twice-yearly tests for the rest, plus a test after any major change.

When comparing DRaaS providers, ask where the recovery site is, whether capacity is reserved, who runs failover and how often recovery is tested. FirstNet is a Platinum Veeam Cloud & Service Provider with Veeam-certified engineers, and keeps recovery inside South Africa, with data centres in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town.