How to Plan an Effective Cloud Disaster Recovery Strategy?

In a world where technology drives almost every aspect of our lives, the cloud has elevated this experience. From undertaking complex operational workloads to executing large-scale cloud disaster recovery plans, the cloud has made our day-to-day operations relatively effortless. When it comes to a complex task like managing disaster recovery in the cloud, it’s hard to imagine how challenging it was to carry out a disaster recovery plan (DR plan) before cloud computing’s arrival.

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Consider the time and resources invested in a data disaster recovery plan. If your primary data center were to be affected by a disaster, you would have to rely on the backup data center and refer to the conventional disaster recovery process, which, of course, comes with double the work, including:

• Setting up a physical location and facilities to house your IT infrastructure
• Engaging contact persons and security personnel for the setup
• Enhancing server capacity to store data and match your application’s scaling requirements
• Provisioning support staff for infrastructure maintenance
• Facilitating internet connectivity with enough bandwidth to run applications
• Setup network infrastructure, including firewalls, load balancers, routers, and switches

This data disaster recovery process would lead to spiraling costs and unmanageable resources, leaving the data center as just a data backup and nothing more. With the dawn of cloud computing and disaster recovery, cloud disaster recovery has become an effortless task that can be handled in a couple of hours or minutes.

In today’s digital age, safeguarding your business against unexpected disruptions is more crucial than ever. At Veritis, we understand that every second of downtime can translate to significant losses. That’s why we’re excited to guide you through creating a cloud disaster recovery plan that’s robust, reliable, innovative, and tailored to your unique needs. With our specialized knowledge and actionable advice, you’ll be equipped to protect your data, maintain seamless operations, and ensure your business can weather any storm, no matter the challenges. Let’s embark on this journey together, turning potential threats into opportunities for resilience and growth.

What is Cloud Disaster Recovery?

Disaster Recovery in Cloud, often called cloud DR, is a comprehensive approach encompassing strategies and services for safeguarding data, applications, and assets by replicating them to public cloud environments or dedicated service providers. In a disaster, this replicated data can be used to restore affected systems to a local data center or a cloud provider, enabling the enterprise to resume its standard operations.

The core objective of cloud DR mirrors that of a traditional disaster recovery plan: to protect critical business resources and guarantee their accessibility and recoverability, thereby ensuring uninterrupted business continuity. The key difference lies in the efficiency and scalability of disaster recovery in the cloud, which allows businesses to recover more rapidly and with fewer resources than conventional methods.

Useful Link: What is Cloud Computing?

Global Disaster Recovery Solution Stats

An elaborated cloud disaster recovery strategy prescribes recovering data, applications, and the IT infrastructure after a disaster and guarantees business continuity. The disaster recovery strategy, Recovery Time Objective (RTO), and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) define the scope of permissible downtime and acceptable data loss during such events. The plan must also contain details concerning backup solutions, replication methodologies, and failover mechanisms to establish proper data protection across cloud environments.

Given this point, a cloud plan for disaster recovery must present clear roles and responsibilities, communication channels, and testing periods. It must also use security interventions such as encryption and multi-factor authentication while utilizing sensitive data to implement the recovery process. Integrating such components will provide a two-legged cloud strategy through which companies show that disaster recovery is resilient, scalable, and efficient, guaranteeing minimum disruption following unforeseen events.

1) Market Share

• The global disaster recovery solutions market will grow from USD 14.3 billion in 2024 to USD 95.0 billion by 2033. (Source: Market.us)
• The disaster recovery market will grow at a CAGR of 23.4%. (Source: Market.us)
• The market is expected to consistently increase yearly, with notable milestones, including USD 21.8 billion in 2026 and USD 50.5 billion in 2030. (Source: Market.us)
• By 2033, Backup & Recovery and Data Security services will dominate the market, highlighting the need for robust disaster recovery solutions. (Source: Market.us)

2) Cost of Downtime

• The average cost of IT downtime is USD 5,600 per minute. (Gartner)
• According to ITIC, 98% of organizations report that a single hour of downtime costs more than USD 100,000.
• According to FEMA, 40% of small businesses never reopen after experiencing a disaster.

3) Prevalence of Disasters

• 73% of businesses have experienced data breaches in the past two years. (Verizon)
• According to the University of Texas, 93% of firms without a disaster recovery plan for cloud services that suffer a major data disaster are out of business within one year.
• Statistics show that 60% of firms that lose their data will shut down within six months. (Boston Computing Network)
• 30% of businesses that experience a significant fire leave within a year, and 70% fail within five years. (Home Office Computing Magazine)

4) Cloud Adoption for Disaster Recovery

• 70% of organizations use disaster recovery in cloud computing (Frost and Sullivan).
• 95% of businesses report improvements in IT operations after adopting disaster recovery in cloud computing (IDC).
• 90% of organizations use disaster recovery in cloud computing to increase their cloud budgets in the next three years (Forrester).
• Organizations using cloud-based solutions report a 50% reduction in disaster recovery costs compared to traditional methods (TechRepublic).

5) Effectiveness of Disaster Recovery Plans

• Statistics indicate that 96% of firms with a trusted backup and disaster recovery plan for cloud services survived ransomware attacks. (Aberdeen Group).
• Businesses that can effectively recover within four hours of a disaster experience 2.5 times less downtime (Gartner).
• Organizations that test their disaster recovery plan for cloud services at least twice yearly experience 60% less downtime (IDC).

Useful Link: What is Security as a Service (SECaaS)?

Picking a Cloud Disaster Recovery Provider

When choosing a cloud disaster recovery (DR) provider, a company should take into account the following five key factors:

1) Scalability

Evaluate the scalability of disaster recovery in cloud computing, ensuring they can safeguard designated data, applications, and assets. They should also be able to expand to accommodate additional resources, delivering consistent performance even as other clients globally utilize the services.

2) Security and Compliance

Comprehend the security prerequisites for your DR plan and confirm that the provider can provide essential security measures like authentication, virtual private networks, encryption, and other tools required to protect your valuable assets. Assess compliance demands to guarantee that the provider holds certifications aligning with business-related compliance standards, like Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), ISO 27001, SOC 2, and SOC 3.

3) Reliability

Assess the dependability of the Cloud disaster recovery solution provider. While even cloud services may encounter downtime, it’s crucial to avoid service interruptions during recovery, as they can harm the business equally.

4) Distance

A business should consider the physical proximity and latency of the cloud DR solutions provider. Placing disaster recovery in the cloud too nearby increases the vulnerability to shared physical disasters, while locating it too far can lead to latency and network congestion, hampering disaster recovery content accessibility. The situation becomes more complex when the cloud disaster recovery content is required to be accessible from numerous global business sites.

5) Architecture

Examine the architectural requirements of the DR platform. DR can be approached through three fundamental methods: cold, warm, and hot disaster recovery plan for cloud services. These terms roughly correspond to the simplicity of system recovery.

Useful Link: Disaster Recovery – No More A Budgetary Constraint with Cloud

Testing Your Disaster Recovery Plan in Cloud Computing

1) Importance of Testing

Systematic testing of the disaster recovery plan ensures that these recovery processes will still work as planned in the event of a disaster. It identifies gaps, optimizes recovery time, and lessens the risks.

2) Testing Methods

Testing could be realized through tabletop exercises, simulation tests, and full failover tests. Each of these tests would evaluate a different aspect of your cloud disaster recovery plan and thus ensure readiness for various disasters.

3) Testing Frequency

Regular tests, preferably once every quarter, will keep the cloud-based disaster recovery program updated and applicable. This regular testing will keep you updated on any infrastructure and business needs changes.

4) Documentation and Updating

Keep comprehensive records of all testing results and cloud disaster recovery plan updates. This documentation provides accountability and many opportunities for improving the plan for future tests.

5) Involve All Stakeholders

Test key personnel from IT, security, and other departments. Involving all stakeholders assures program alignment for communication and a fast recovery process when disaster strikes.

Types of Disasters in Cloud Environments

1) Cyberattacks

Cyber threats like DDoS attacks and ransomware can significantly disrupt business operations and compromise sensitive data. These attacks are often sophisticated, targeting vulnerabilities in your cloud infrastructure. DDoS attacks can overwhelm your servers with traffic, rendering them unavailable, while ransomware encrypts critical data, demanding a ransom for its release. To effectively defend your business against cyber threats, it’s crucial to implement comprehensive security measures. This involves implementing firewalls and intrusion detection systems and conducting regular security audits. Enhancing protection with encryption and multi-factor authentication can offer extra security for sensitive data, forming a core part of your cloud disaster recovery plan.

2) Hardware Failures

Aging infrastructure or poor manufacturing quality can lead to unexpected hardware failures, causing downtime and potential data loss. These failures can occur in physical servers, storage devices, or network equipment. Cloud disaster recovery providers often offer hardware redundancy and failover mechanisms to mitigate this risk. Consistently keeping your hardware up-to-date and well-maintained is vital for optimal security and performance; maintaining hardware compatibility with the latest software versions and security updates is essential. Monitoring systems should be in place to detect early signs of hardware degradation and trigger pre-emptive maintenance or replacements, ensuring business continuity through an effective disaster recovery strategy.

3) Software Failures

Bugs and software glitches can result in data loss, corruption, or unavailability. These failures can stem from application code, operating systems, or cloud management platforms. Regularly updating software to the latest versions and promptly applying security patches helps maintain system integrity and protect against vulnerabilities. Employing rigorous testing procedures, including unit, integration, and user acceptance tests, ensures that software changes do not introduce new vulnerabilities. Additionally, adopting a DevOps approach with continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines can enhance software reliability and speed up the resolution of issues, key aspects of a strong disaster recovery plan.

4) Human Errors

Unintentional mistakes, such as accidental data deletions or modifications, can lead to significant disruptions. These errors can occur during routine operations, such as configuration changes, software updates, or migrations. Implementing strict access controls and role-based permissions helps minimize the risk of unauthorized or accidental changes. Ongoing staff training and awareness programs are critical in minimizing human errors. Additionally, implementing robust version control systems and automated backup solutions ensures rapid data recovery during accidental deletions or modifications, forming an essential part of your cloud disaster recovery process.

5) Network Failures

Network issues can prevent access to critical data and applications, halting business operations. Hardware malfunctions, configuration errors, or external factors such as cyberattacks or natural disasters can cause these failures. Ensuring a reliable and redundant network infrastructure is critical to avoiding these disruptions. Employing techniques such as load balancing, failover clustering, and geographic redundancy can enhance network resilience. Regularly monitoring network performance and conducting stress tests can help detect and handle potential bottlenecks or vulnerabilities before they impact operations, further strengthening your disaster recovery in the cloud strategy.

By understanding and preparing for these types of disasters, you can develop a robust cloud disaster recovery strategy that ensures business continuity and decreases the impact of disruptions.

Useful Link: The Impact of Cloud Integration on Managed Data Services

Benefits of Cloud Disaster Recovery

Cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) and backup offer numerous advantages in contrast to conventional DR approaches:

1) Pay As You Go Model

The pay-as-you-go model of cloud services offers a significant benefit compared to traditional DR plan methods, where DIY facilities or managed colocation providers involve substantial upfront capital costs and long-term contracts.

Cloud services allow organizations to pay a monthly fee based on resource and service usage, converting capital costs into ongoing operational expenses. Additionally, cloud disaster recovery providers may offer discounts for extended resource commitments, making this model appealing to larger organizations with consistent cloud disaster recovery needs.

2) Scalability and Flexibility

Conventional DR methods, often employed in local or remote data centers, tend to restrict flexibility and scalability. They require businesses to purchase servers, storage, network equipment, and software tools for DR, along with the design, testing, and maintenance of the DR infrastructure. This results in substantial capital and ongoing expenses.

On the other hand, Cloud disaster recovery options, including public cloud services and cloud disaster recovery strategy as a service (DRaaS), offer the advantage of on-demand access to extensive resources. This permits companies to quickly scale up or down via a self-service portal, accommodating changes in workload and data needs without the burden of hefty capital investments.

3) High Reliability and Geo-Redundancy

High reliability and geo-redundancy are vital characteristics of cloud providers. With a global presence encompassing multiple data centers in major regions, cloud providers enhance service reliability and redundancy. Businesses can easily leverage this geo-redundancy by locating DR resources in alternative regions, even across multiple regions, to optimize availability. This aligns seamlessly with the cloud’s inherent off-site DR capabilities.

4) Easy Testing and Quick Recovery

Effortless testing and rapid recovery are facilitated by cloud workloads, which frequently employ VMs. This allows straightforward VM image file duplication to on-premises test servers, enabling validation of workload availability without disrupting production processes. Moreover, businesses can choose high-bandwidth and fast disk input/output options to enhance data transfer speed, ensuring they meet recovery time objectives (RTO). It’s essential to bear in mind that data transfers from cloud providers may incur costs, so testing should be conducted with awareness of these expenses, mainly related to cloud data egress.

5) No Limitations Based on Physical Location

There are no constraints related to physical location. Cloud disaster recovery solutions allow organizations to position their backup facility virtually anywhere globally, independent of their physical premises. This offers an extra layer of security if a disaster threatens the servers and equipment housed within the organization’s physical structure.

Useful Link: Building a Resilient IT Infrastructure With Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

A Cloud Disaster Recovery Strategy offers organizations several benefits, including:

• Saves Time/Capital
• More Data Backup Location Options
• Easy to Implement with High Reliability
• Scalability

Cloud Disaster Recovery Plan

For organizations considering cloud disaster recovery strategy for the first time and are wondering where to start, here’s an easy cloud disaster recovery plan that will help you plan an effective disaster recovery in cloud computing:

Step 1: Understand Your Infrastructure and Outline Any Risks

Consider your IT infrastructure, including the assets, equipment, and data you possess, to create an effective disaster recovery in cloud computing process.

It’s also essential to assess where all this is stored and how much it is worth. Once you’ve sorted this out, you can tailor a good cloud disaster recovery plan. You now need to evaluate the risks that might affect all this. Risks can include natural disasters, data theft, and power outages.

Now that you have an account of all your assets, their quantities, and possible disaster threats, you can better design your data disaster recovery in cloud strategy to eliminate/minimize these risks.

Step 2: Conduct a Business Impact Analysis

Next on the list is a business impact analysis. This will help you understand the limitations of your business operations once disaster strikes, and you can consider them while forming the cloud disaster recovery plan.

The following two parameters help you assess this factor:

a) Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

b) Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

a) Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

Regarding cloud disaster recovery, RTO is the maximum time your application can stay offline before beginning to affect your business operations.

Scenario 1: If your company is dedicated to fast-paced service delivery, an application failure can cost you heavy losses.

Moreover, you’ll have to invest heavily in an IT disaster recovery planning process to resume business operations in minutes.

Scenario 2: If you have a medium-paced business and disaster affects your operations, you can still find alternative ways to carry out business operations.

Therefore, you can set your RTO for as long as one week in your DR plan. In such a case, you will not have to invest many resources into data disaster recovery in cloud planning, thus saving ample time to acquire sufficient disaster recovery cloud solution resources after the disaster strikes. Knowing your RTO is very important, as it is equivalent to the resources you have to invest in your disaster recovery as a service plan. The time lost in the RTO can be used to gather backup resources.

b) Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

RPO is the maximum amount of time you can bear data loss from your application due to a significant crisis.

Points to consider for determining RPO:

1) Possible data loss when disaster strikes

2) Possible time loss before the data compromise

If you apply the scenario mentioned above, your RPO can be as little as five minutes, as your business is critical and cannot afford more than the specified time-lapse.

For Scenario 2, you may want to backup your data, but since the data isn’t time-sensitive, you will not have to invest heavily in a cloud disaster recovery plan.

Step 3: Creating a Cloud Disaster Recovery plan based on your RPO and RTO

Now that you have determined your RPO and RTO, you can focus on designing a system to meet your IT Disaster Recovery planning goals.

You can choose from the below range of Disaster Recovery strategies to implement your disaster recovery in cloud computing:

• Backup and Restore
• Pilot Light Approach
• Warm Standby
• Full replication in the Cloud
• Multi-Cloud Option

You can use a combination of these approaches to your benefit or exclusively as per your business requirement.

Step 4: Approach the Right Cloud Partner

After considering creating a cloud disaster recovery plan, the next step is to find a trusted cloud service provider to help with the deployment.

If you plan to use the full replication in the Cloud, then you would like to consider the following factors to assess an ideal cloud provider:

• Reliability
• Speed of Recovery
• Usability
• Simplicity in Setup and Recovery
• Scalability
• Security ComplianceFactors to Assess an Ideal Cloud Provider

Big cloud service providers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM, offer cloud dr solutions. In addition to these big firms, medium and small firms offer quality Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS).

Useful Link: What is a Disaster Recovery Plan? How Confident Are You in Implementing it?

Step 5: Build Your Cloud Disaster Recovery Infrastructure

After consulting a cloud disaster recovery partner, you can work with the provider to implement your design and set up your DR plan.

Based on the cloud disaster recovery strategy you select, there are several logistical aspects to consider:

• What is the quantity of infrastructure components you will require?
• By what means will you copy the data to the cloud?
• What are the best ways to approach user authentication and access management?
• What security and cloud disaster recovery best practices will you need to set up?
• What security measures will you implement to minimize the likelihood of disasters?

Remember! It is crucial to ensure your DR plan is aligned with your RTO and RPO specifications for smooth business operations.

Step 6: Put Your Cloud Disaster Recovery Plan on Paper

It is essential to have a standard guideline or process flowchart with specific instructions for each and everyone involved in your IT disaster recovery plan. When a disaster occurs, each individual should be ready to take charge of the responsibility as per his role in the cloud disaster recovery services.

Moreover, every instruction should be clearly stated on paper, with the finest details mentioned.

These steps ensure the effectiveness of the cloud disaster recovery plan.

Step 7: Test Your Cloud Disaster Recovery Plan Often

Since your cloud disaster recovery plan is on paper, the next step would involve testing your IT discovery recovery plan more often. This helps to ensure that there are no loopholes.

On paper, the DR plan may look like the most comprehensive one, but you will know its credibility only after testing.

Your first test may not go as well as you thought; it may be worse. But then, you will learn from these experiences and upgrade your cloud based disaster recovery service to better brace your infrastructure against potential disasters.

The bigger your disaster recovery in cloud computing plan, the more critical it becomes to test it. Coming to the frequency of your tests, it is recommended that you run your DR tests every quarter.

Meanwhile, you can monitor and analyze your backup infrastructure performance daily or weekly.

Your organization will always witness change in terms of people, processes, and technologies. Testing your disaster recovery in the cloud throughout these changes ensures the business is always ready for an emergency.

Final Thoughts

Knowledge of cloud disaster recovery best practices keeps your organization safer. Have you identified your cloud platform? Are you looking for a trusted DRaaS provider? Contact Veritis, a Stevie Award and Globee Business Award winner, to learn about the various cloud disaster recovery strategies and identify the one that suits your business requirements!

Veritis, with over 20 years of rich experience and more than 600 projects behind it, knows what it takes to facilitate customized DRaaS offerings from different service providers, including AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Our team comprises AWS Certified, Azure Certified and GCP Certified cloud consultants so that experts can focus on your entire cloud disaster recovery strategy. Veritis is an IT consulting company that has promised its clients 100 percent satisfaction and 100 percent quality for the never-ending passion of commitment and attention to detail.

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