Dr is a service: should disaster recovery be transferred to the cloud?

Early-adopters have demonstrated the viability of cloud computing and the benefits of managing and reducing costs, and businesses are increasingly moving their core business applications and IT services to the cloud. In fact, after verifying the viability of SaaS applications, such as CRM and ERP, in the cloud environment, many organizations are considering using cloud based disaster recovery (DR) to replace their traditional onsite backup and disaster recovery. By 2014, Gartner says, more than 30% of midsize enterprises will be using cloud disaster recovery or recovery as a service. This begs the question: is your business ready for Dr?

The impetus behind the change

Deploying a traditional Dr solution often requires overcoming many hurdles. First, deploying, configuring, and managing these solutions is a pain in the way for already overburdened IT staff. In addition, some Dr Solutions require complex consolidation, coordination, and scheduling of different systems for multiple backup sites.

Also, traditional solutions are difficult to budget and often require a lot of upfront money to buy hardware, software, and network infrastructure, as well as having the same equipment on multiple sites. After the disaster recovery system is established, the cost of expansion of these systems is also very high. In addition, businesses must manage and maintain these multiple infrastructures, which adds to the overhead.

Another problem with disaster recovery is uncertainty. Many Dr Administrators have no idea whether they can recover the data they have backed up.

Overall, the worst Dr is no Dr. However, the scary truth is that most companies find it difficult to enable any Dr plans or solutions.

Can disaster recovery transfer to a cloud environment help?

Cloud based Dr Services can help solve many of the problems in traditional methods. First, Cloud based Dr Services are easy to use and manage because they are usually turnkey (turnkey) solutions that are hosted and managed entirely by the cloud vendor. In addition, because cloud Dr Services are run in virtualized environments, they are often easier to scale, provide greater deployment flexibility, and adapt to future unanticipated growth. This extensibility also provides a wider range of Dr Choices, such as complementing or enhancing VMware, Nas, or bare metal recovery solutions, to achieve the most appropriate deployment. Perhaps most importantly, by making processes easier, cloud-based Dr Services can enable many overburdened IT organizations to truly deploy a DR solution.

Using cloud services can also save money. By eliminating high hardware costs, this saves a lot of upfront capital spending. Dr becomes a flexible, paid-for-use operating expense that the enterprise only needs to pay for the services they need, and can adjust or terminate the service as needed.

Recovery as a service can also help ensure reliability. There is no upfront investment, so this makes it easier for the enterprise to test the solution before deployment. In addition, cloud based Dr Technology is mature enough to provide reliable quality service and uptime, as well as cloud based validation of backup data.

Not perfect.

However, the cloud based Dr Service also brings many challenges to the enterprise, the enterprise must understand clearly. For example, putting your backup in the cloud may increase your reliance on network availability and the level of service your vendors have.

Similarly, for cloud-based Dr Services, enterprise control of throughput is reduced, and any performance degradation can cause transmission delays. While this does not have a noticeable effect on static files or e-mail messages, in other cases, such as restoring a dynamically replicated database, it can have a significant impact. Increased demand for additional bandwidth can also lead to unexpected cost overruns.

Compliance issues are another important concern for businesses considering cloud based Dr Services. Although cloud-based security and encryption technologies are mature, there are still grey areas in terms of meeting compliance requirements, such as medical or financial data.

You ready?

Dr is about converting uncertainty to certainty. We are not sure when a catastrophic event will occur, but we should also be sure that we have deployed the necessary systems and procedures to prevent disaster. To determine whether your business is ready to move disaster recovery to a cloud environment, you need to consider the factors associated with the enterprise itself and the service provider. The feasibility of deploying recovery as a service in your enterprise is closely related to business and technical standards.

On the business side, you need to calculate ROI, compare the cost of a cloud based Dr cost with a traditional onsite DR (including equipment and personnel), compared to the estimated cost of a catastrophic system failure when a disaster recovery solution is not deployed at all.

For any disaster recovery plan, you should identify the recovery time objective (RTO), in which the core system must be restored, so that it does not cause any disruption of revenue to business continuity. You should also identify the system components that will be adversely affected by the latency of potential transmission delays. In addition, you should explicitly comply with areas where industry compliance requires attention (for example, end-to-end encryption of transmission and dynamic data, or fine-grained recovery of transaction data).

You also need to consider what features you need to meet your business-specific recovery requirements. Potential data recovery capabilities that an enterprise might require include file-based backup, multiplatform device and operating system support, and archiving. Potential system recovery capabilities may include block based backups, as well as the ability to quickly recover applications in the cloud, and then gradually recover applications in the enterprise.

For cloud service providers, you need to verify that their service level agreements (SLAs) meet your business needs, especially in terms of reliability, performance, and compliance. Carefully review the terms of cost associated with capacity expansion or bandwidth.

Make sure you are willing to put your data in the cloud vendor's environment. Identify the security and availability features of your vendor's cloud data center, such as AES 256-bit encryption, uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and seismic rating for data in transit, and physical security measures such as biometrics and dynamic sensitive CCTV monitoring.

The underlying technology used by service providers can also demonstrate the viability of their solutions. You need to look for a supplier that offers comprehensive, full-featured products on a mature platform, and the supplier also needs to have the centralization of data and policy and detailed reporting to hang you up.

By carefully evaluating these criteria, you can basically determine whether the cloud-based Dr Service is applicable to your business.

Summary

Deploying a disaster recovery solution is never easy. But for some companies, the advent of cloud-based disaster recovery services allows them to deploy disaster recovery solutions more easily and cost-effectively. Whether your organization can take full advantage of the cloud solution's advantages will depend on your enterprise's unique disaster recovery needs, and the matching services, if you do not get a thorough understanding of their disaster recovery needs and hasty decision, will only add more uncertainty.