Cloud Disaster Recovery

Posted by riverrmerlin on August 26th, 2016

Cloud disaster recovery is a strategy to backup and restores electronic data of an organization to enable the recovery of critical information in case of natural or man-made catastrophe. Using cloud services for disaster recovery is an attractive alternative for companies which have limited IT resources. Having disaster recovery sites in the cloud reduces the need for data center, IT infrastructure, and resources which result in cost reduction and enables small companies to develop disaster recovery options that were previously a luxury available only to huge enterprises.

This disaster recovery solution gives rise to a number of concerns particularly about the safety of the data, accessibility, and authentication of its users and if the cloud provider meets the necessary regulatory requirements. Since clouds are accessed through the internet, the bandwidth also needs to be taken into consideration.

Another method of disaster recovery is snapshot storage which is a set of reference markers or pointer to data stored on a disk drive, tape or a storage area network. A snapshot is treated by the computer as a data backup. Snapshots streamline access to stored data and speed up the process of data recovery.

With the increasing trend towards cloud storage and cloud disaster recovery, many companies began to offer their services in this regard. Their clients included both organizations as well as private customers. CloudEndure is one such entity which offers cloud migration and cloud disaster recovery for any application. It allows companies to transfer their data to and across clouds with almost zero downtime and no data loss.All it requires is a single click to duplicate the entire workload upto that very second.It not only replicates but also transforms the workload into a compatible format for the targeted cloud. Unlike snapshot based solution CloudEndure enables consistent, real-time replication using continuous data protection.

While evaluating cloud disaster recovery options usually the first step is to evaluate the data protection needs of the organization. When that is done the next step is to identify all those cloud providers who fulfill those needs. The budgetary aspects are also to be considered simultaneously. The organization will also be required to devise a strategy for internet bandwidth. To be more precise every cloud disaster recoveryoption has its pros and cons but the selection of the correct CDR option, compatible with the needs of the organization is as important as the option itself and is critical to the well-being of the organization.