Cloud Disaster Recovery (Cloud DR): All you need to know

Data is one of the most valuable assets that any company can hold. One of the best ways to store these assets is within the cloud. However, what can you do if a disaster occurs that affects your cloud data? It’s almost impossible to predict when you will need disaster recovery in cloud computing, so if you can’t control when a disaster strikes, the next best thing is to be able to control the recovery process. Disaster recovery in cloud computing can be done through measures such as a robust backup system or even by using multiple servers in different regions to reduce the harm a single disaster could cause.

What is Cloud Disaster Recovery (Cloud DR)?

Cloud disaster recovery (or “Cloud DR”, for short) combines services and strategies to store backup data, apps, and other resources in cloud storage, be it public clouds or a dedicated service provider. If a disaster occurs, all affected data, apps, and resources can be easily restored to the primary data center or a cloud provider to resume operations.

As far as purpose goes, cloud DR is virtually identical to traditional disaster recovery – it aims to protect your company’s resources and ensure business continuity via reliable data access and immediate recovery.

Before cloud DR, traditional DR was limited to local DR and alternative-site options. Storing your data in a local data center wouldn’t do much good in the event of a flood, fire, or earthquake. An alternative storage site may protect against natural disasters but add significant business costs for constructing and managing the secondary site.

With cloud DR in the picture, public cloud and managed service providers (MSPs) can offer clients a dedicated facility with a wide range of backup and DR services. Companies can receive continuous access to automated, highly scalable, self-driven DR services off-site without the added expense of choosing, installing, and maintaining DR tools in a secondary data center.

How does Cloud DR work?

Cloud DR involves storing important data and applications at an off-site data center and failing over to a virtual host or a secondary site in the event of a crisis. This helps businesses quickly get back up and running when disasters strike and minimizes the impact of disruptive events on their business.

Cloud Disaster Recovery vendors are responsible for ensuring systems and applications are regularly patched and up to date. And since most cloud DR functions can be automated, it reduces the chances of errors and requires minimum involvement on the users’ part.

Most cloud DR operates via pay-as-you-go services, which means businesses must pay only for the amount of storage and number of software licenses used. Cloud DR also provides users the flexibility to scale up services to suit their business needs.

Why is Cloud Disaster Recovery important?

According to research conducted by Uptime Institute, 44% of surveyed organizations experienced a major outage that impacted their business. Most of these outages were a result of power failures. In such cases, it is critical to have a solid DR strategy in place. When power fails, enterprises can quickly recover their data and resume normal operations.

In addition to providing availability during power failures, disaster recovery strategies can help ensure business continuity during network or power outages, system failures, natural disasters, accidents, cyber attacks, and during software updates. However, traditional DR, which leans heavily on on-premise resources, is often complex and expensive.

Cloud Disaster Recovery offers a more affordable and simpler solution. Often, Cloud DR is offered as a Software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, which can be scaled according to the business’s unique needs. In most cases, the interfaces are simple and user-friendly and the solution can be quickly deployed. In short, Cloud DR offers affordability, flexibility, and scalability.

Advantages of Cloud Disaster Recovery

When compared to more conventional disaster recovery strategies, cloud DR offers many significant advantages. They are defined below.

Choices for pay-as-you-go

Companies that implemented do-it-yourself (DIY) disaster recovery facilities incurred substantial cash expenses, whereas participating maintained colocation vendors for off-site DR systems management entail lengthy licensing agreements. The pay-as-you-go framework of cloud providers allows companies to charge a repeated subscription fee only for the utilized programs and infrastructure. The transactions modify as assets are added or erased.

Scalability and adaptability

Classical disaster recovery methodologies were typically implemented in local or remote cloud services, frequently enforcing capability and usability constraints. The company had to purchase the servers, storage, networking devices, and productivity tools required for Disaster recovery and layout, measure, and build the system required to manage DR activities – significantly more if the DR was guided to a secondary server farm. It was traditionally a significant capital and repetitive expenditure for the company.

High dependability and geographical redundancy

A global footprint is an essential requirement of a cloud service, guaranteeing multiple systems to support customers across significant international geostrategic areas. Cloud providers use this to accomplish better durability and guarantee duplication. Companies can easily use geo-duplication to position disaster recovery assets in some other place-or even several regions-to enhance accessibility. The classic off-site disaster recovery situation is a natural formation of the cloud.

Testing is simple, and restoration is quick

Cloud workforces frequently run as virtual machines (VMs), making it simple to duplicate Virtual machine picture files to in-house sample data centers to verify workforce accessibility without disrupting production workloads. Furthermore, corporations can choose high bandwidth and rapid disk I/O (input/output) alternatives to maximize transmission speeds required to address restoration time objective requirements (RTO). Data transfer from cloud services, on the other hand, incurs expenses, so tests should be done with those information transfer-cloud data entry and exit costs in my opinion.

Drawbacks of Cloud DR

• Increased Compliance Requirements: Migrating data and other resources to the cloud comes with its own set of risks. Storing data off-site for disaster recovery means businesses must comply with new regulatory measures.
• Potential Connectivity Issues: Users require an internet connection to access company data stored in the cloud, which could be a problem when facing connectivity issues. Cloud DR introduces increased barriers to accessing data at times.
• Limited by the Service Provider’s SLA: The service provider’s standards and the client’s standards don’t always match up. Sometimes, this can pose a problem when meeting Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs).

Conclusion

As businesses keep embracing the cloud as a second means for offering IT services, cloud-based disaster recovery strategies are becoming more advanced, and the advantages of cloud solutions are increasing. Flexible payment models, Near-zero downtime, Reduced TCO, and scalability allow you to protect your application and business data in a controlled and predictable way while keeping investment low and improving business resiliency. Cloud is the only thing now available that helps businesses stay protected, whether an IT disaster or any other storm may impact.