Disaster Recovery (DR) is a concept that is more than a need for many IT firms globally, especially those with well-established infrastructure capabilities.
While creative and continuous development have become key to success over the period, early risk recovery or overcoming failures is one major aspect that firms are now examining.
Disasters, either natural or human-made, affect the critical business functioning of any organization.
Outages are one of many disaster concerns companies worry about as a cause of significant downtime in their operations. Security breaches, software errors, and hardware failures are among the most common scenarios that lead to outages.
Firms are looking at Disaster Recovery and business continuity strategies as a solution to avoid loss of productivity and revenue caused by disasters.
However, many firms report high costs, the requirement of huge resources, and difficulty in implementation and management when adopting commercial solutions as part of their DR strategy.
This is where cloud appeared a choice!
Having Backup is Just Not Enough for DR!
When it comes to cloud as a DR strategy, the major confusion that arises is regarding the understanding of backup and DR as two different aspects, though interlinked.
While backup is a key part of a disaster recovery plan, it can also happen without DR. Though having a backup is easier, ignoring DR is not the right strategy and can lead to huge losses.
A backup can store your data in case of any issue with the primary system; however, restoring lost data requires a separate platform or environment for the data to reside in and allow restoring. This is where disaster recovery arrives!
While backup can only save your data, the right DR plan can help you in case of the downfall of an entire IT infrastructure failure, including data centers, by helping you manage (restore and access) with a secondary environment and then transfer the same to the primary environment post-recovery.
The Best Practice Approach to Disaster Recovery (DR)
10 Professional DR practices proposed by Disaster Recovery Institute International (DRII) in common for every business continuity and disaster recovery program with cloud:
Cloud as an Effective DR Strategy
Cloud is considered as an effective DR strategy for many reasons because of its client-friendly options. Some of them include:
- Offers facility to back up data online or remotely while also facilitating quicker access of the same as and when required
- Provides the ability to maintain a secondary center away from the primary backup center, allowing regional disaster recovery
- Allows to save business continuity plans and core notification scripts at the secondary center, avoiding chances of the loss of critical business plans at the primary center, thus facilitating higher chances of recovery across large firms
- Facilitates replication of servers to a remote site for data backup in case of smaller firms that can’t afford to have two different centers like larger firms
- Beneficial even for high-end firms that can have sophisticated DR architecture in terms of financial savings and giving complete control over processes, allowing them to test more often
Many firms feel that public cloud is a cost-effective DR plan!
Public Cloud is one major option that many firms consider as a strategy that addresses budgetary constraints associated with disaster recovery.
As a cost-effective solution, public cloud offers a dynamic combination of hybrid on- and off-premise resources, ensuring business flexibility across firms.
Some of the key aspects to be considered in adopting public cloud as an effective Disaster Recovery strategy:
- Automation: This is one key factor that traditional systems lagged in addressing on-time recovery because of heavy manual processes in testing, deployment, and recovery procedures. Automation ensures predictability and reliability with low costs.
- Testing: Testing is key to DR strategy as it helps identify process failures. However, testing traditional DR systems was a problem. No worries! Automation is now in use. Dealing with the complexities of manual testing procedures, automation can help you in DR testing procedures by verifying and sorting out the captured test cases to finally test the full recovery of the workload.
- Effective Management: Effective management and IT administration are key to the success of a disaster recovery strategy. It is important to manage both on-premises and public cloud workloads together as a single pool of resources, making recovery easy.
- Flexibility in Implementation: Flexibility in implementation is one key aspect that a DR solution should ideally provide. Unlike most Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) processes, which limit the time you operate on the cloud, the public cloud allows you to run completely on the cloud until the end of recovery, facilitating the successful implementation of a disaster recovery strategy.
You don’t have to worry anymore. Be it a firm of any size, cloud disaster recovery services can be a right and budget-friendly disaster recovery strategy you can invest in to deal with unexpected disaster concerns.
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