When implementing IT DR, the continuous changes to the IT landscape and users' preferences should be reviewed constantly. The COVID-19 outbreak will become the most immense impetus for IT DR to evolve to another level.
What are the advantages of DraaS when compared to traditional DR? What can DR on the cloud provide that the old methods fail to deliver? Price is the most immediate and obvious talking point between the two methods.
Traditional DR demands exorbitant prices for the most responsive IT services, which may include a complete duplication of the hardware in the main site, the costs of a backup site, tape devices and media, and the necessary software to ensure synchronous duplication of the data.
Additionally, complex licensing paths may require specialists to decipher them, incurring even more expenses.
Cloud DR has little of that as required by Traditional DR. Maintenance expenses fall under the purview of the service provider rather than the receiver. Organizations only have to pay for the resources they consume rather than spend money on needlessly maintaining systems that could be used only once per year. It is a far superior viable option and highly elastic; the ability to offload everything to the cloud makes it much more manageable.
This is just an introductory discussion on moving away from traditional to Cloud DR. There are many arguments for and against, but there are also other variables, namely, investment and obsolesce of expensive old technology that is still working.
Figure 3-10: DRaaS versus Traditional DR
Goh, M. H. (2016). A Manager's Guide to Implementing Your IT Disaster Recovery Plan. Business Continuity Management Specialist Series (2nd ed.). Singapore: GMH Pte Ltd.
Extracted from "Chapter 4: Project Management: Step 1: Establish the Need for DR Planning"