An Introduction to the Disaster Recovery World

Posted by alvina on May 23rd, 2018

The process of creating a backup which can be restored later as a security measure is termed as disaster recovery. Cloud DR solutions include creating copies of the electronic records in a cloud computing environment with an aim to help the organization in case of a natural or human-induced disaster.

It is possible to implement Cloud disaster recovery solution in-house, partially in-house or it can even be purchased as a service. Because of this flexibility, even the smaller organizations an easily implement the best disaster recovery plans.

When you opt for a cloud service, you do not need to spend on hardware, network resources, data center space and the personnel for supporting them, because the cloud provider will spend on the purchase and maintenance of the necessary items and charges the users for storage on pay-per-use the basis of capacity, bandwidth or seat.

It is necessary to check if there are enough bandwidth and network resources with the organization for transferring the data between the primary site and the cloud in less time. Also, data encryption when it leaves the data center must be-be possible on the part of the organization.

An ideal cloud dr solution ensures the service continuity and failover to the second site in case of a hardware or a software failure

In such a scenario the workloads are failed back to the original location after resolution of the crisis. The failover and failback occur automatically. In order to ensure that everything occurs smoothly, tests should be run by the organizations at regular intervals on separate segments of networks which do not have any effect on the production data.

It can be chosen by the organizations to failover data, entire applications or virtual machine (VM) images. In case of failover of data, file services in the cloud make it available. But when there is a huge amount of data, it can take a long time for cloud recovery.

It is possible to replicate the data which are application based or an entire VM image to an application running in the cloud. This can be powered up and accessed in case of an on-premises failover.

There are cloud SLAs or Service-level agreements to penalize the cloud providers if they fail to fulfill the promises regarding the cloud services. In case of a service outage or non-recovery of data during a disaster, the customer can be reimbursed with credits which can be used for subscribing to another service or pay the bill. But these credits rarely make up for the loss incurred by the business due to delay in the cloud recovery.

As per the importance of an application for restoring a business after the occurrence of a disaster, the RTO can vary from 1hr-24hrs and even beyond that. The guarantees for uptime, recovery time objectives ( RTO ) and recovery point objectives are included in the SLAs for the cloud disaster recovery.