The main goal of any backup and recovery plan is to provide businesses with a way to access important data, should primary locations be compromised or inaccessible. Cloud disaster recovery refers to strategy involving the storage and maintenance of business data over the cloud as a security measure. Services like VMware cloud failover provides businesses with a secondary environment for their business data and networks, in case their primary production environments fail.
Cloud Recovery Solutions
Many factors contribute to the appeal of cloud disaster recovery. These solutions are usually implemented in-house, partially in-house, or as a managed service, depending on the specific needs of a business. Strategies are flexible so even smaller businesses can incorporate affordable disaster recovery plans into their organizational structure. Disaster recovery resources may rarely be used. It is only when backups and the primary environment fails that they have to be employed. This can allow a business to save, as payment is only required once failure occurs.
Cloud providers may charge businesses on a pay-per-use model, depending on their required bandwidth and capacity. As the provider is in charge of the maintenance and service of storage infrastructure, the business does not have to spend additional money on hardware, network resources, space, and personnel.
Cloud Recovery Process
A cloud disaster recovery solution proves successful if it can provide continuity for a business. It should also have the ability to provide failover to a secondary site in case the IT system experiences hardware or software failure. When a crisis is resolved, workloads should be restored, and data reverted to their original locations. These strategies should be automated for further efficiency and optimization.
An organization should conduct tests at regular intervals and on different aspects of the network. This can ensure data remains adequately protected by a functioning recovery solution. Businesses may choose to employ failover protection strategies for data, applications, and virtual machine images.
Data – Disaster recovery solutions can safeguard data by uploading and making data available on a cloud-based network. This method is only suitable for small amounts of data, as recovery and backup can take a long time with larger amounts.
Applications – Application-based data can be replicated. A similar application able to read the data is left running in the cloud.
Virtual Machine Image – A virtual machine image can be uploaded onto the cloud. The data can be replicated and accessed later in case of failover.
Cloud Service-Level Agreements
Businesses employing the services of cloud providers agree to a service-level agreement. This agreement is meant to hold providers accountable to ensure they continue to provide services and solutions they promised. It can include guarantees for factors like uptime, recovery time objectives, and recovery point objectives. Solutions must be able to deliver on the functionalities and recovery abilities they set out to do. However, it is often the case that the better the guarantees are, the more expensive the cloud service is.
Disaster recovery procedures should be reviewed in order for a business to protect their workloads no matter where data is stored. An organization may want to consider advanced strategies with a synchronized recovery procedure, as these can provide no data loss in case of failover, as well as a fast and automatic recovery.