what is cloud disaster recovery?

Cloud disaster recovery is a backup and restore strategy that involves storing and maintaining copies of data in cloud datacenters as a security measure. The goal of cloud DR is to provide your company with a way to recover data and/or implement failover in the event of a disaster.

There are a number of benefits that make cloud disaster recovery appealing, including the variety of ways it can be implemented: in-house, partially in-house or purchased as a service.

This flexibility allows smaller enterprises to implement robust disaster recovery plans that would otherwise have been impossible. Typically, cloud providers charge for storage on a pay-per-use model, based on capacity, bandwidth or seat. Because the provider is in charge of purchasing and maintaining its storage infrastructure, the customer doesn't have to spend money on additional hardware, network resources, data center space and the personnel.

In addition to cost, there are other important issues to consider before adopting cloud-based disaster recovery:

Does the organization have the necessary bandwidth and network resources to move data fast enough between the primary site and the cloud?
Can the organization encrypt data in flight as it leaves the data center?

FAILOVER AND FAILBACK ARE KEYS TO CLOUD RECOVERY

Effective cloud disaster recovery provides continuity and the ability to fail over to a second site if there is a hardware or software failure of IT systems. Workloads are then failed back to their original locations when the crisis is resolved. Failover and failback can be automated. Companies should run tests at regular intervals on isolated network segments that do not impact production data.

Organizations can choose to fail over data, entire applications or virtual machine (VM) images. When data is failed over, it is available from the cloud. However, cloud recovery can take a long time if there is a great deal of data. Application-based data can be replicated to another application running in the cloud. Or an entire VM image, including data, can be replicated to the cloud and powered up and accessed if there is an on-premises failover.

Cloud disaster recovery solution providers and vendors

Because the cloud removes the need to maintain a second site, DR is considered a prime use case for the cloud. Disaster recovery requires failing applications over to the cloud and failing back, so hundreds of vendors have sprung up to offer cloud DR services. The leading cloud DR as a service vendors include Axcient, Bluelock, IBM Resiliency Services, iland, Microsoft Azure Site Recovery and SunGard Availability Services.

Traditional backup vendors, such as Acronis, Carbonite (EVault), Datto and Unitrends, have expanded into DR services. Amazon Web Services and VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery have also expanded into cloud DR. Other vendors providing cloud DR products and services include Databarracks, Zerto and Zetta.

HOW WE CAN HELP?

Choosing a right solution along with a reliable and local Disaster Recovery provider is a state of art. Because so many factors needs to be assessed before a dicision is made, companies are better off to work with independant consultant rather then with a vendor or DR service provider.