Feasibility Study on Disaster Recovery to Cloud Service

Until now, those who started out with cloud computing have proven the viability and management of cloud computing deployments and the benefits of cost savings, and more and more organizations are now adopting it as their core business application and IT services. In fact, with the success of cloud computing driven by software-as-a-service applications like CRM and ERP, more and more organizations are now hoping to replace traditional live backup with cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) solutions. Gartner pointed out that until 2014, more than 30% of midsize companies will adopt cloud-based disaster recovery or as a recovery service. This raises the question: is your business ready for this step yet?

After the change of driving force

To achieve a traditional disaster recovery solution usually need to overcome a large number of obstacles. First, traditional solutions are often more difficult for deploying, configuring, and managing already over-burdened IT staff. In addition, there is often a need for complex integration, coordination, and dispatch of disparate systems across multiple backup sites.

Traditional solutions can also be difficult to budget. Often hardware and software and network infrastructures, as well as duplicating multiple sites, often require significant upfront capital investment. And once the program is set up, the costs can be very high. In addition, these infrastructures also generate management and maintenance costs, which in turn adds to the overhead of managing overhead.

Another important issue is the uncertainty about traditional disaster recovery. In many cases, many disaster recovery administrators simply do not know if they can rely on the recovery system to recover their backup data. So, taking all these factors into account, one can tell that the worst disaster recovery is almost no disaster recovery. However, it turns out that most businesses have found it hard to get comprehensive disaster recovery plans and easy-to-use solutions.

Can I use cloud computing to solve it?

Cloud-based disaster recovery services may solve some of the traditional problems. First, they are inherently easy to use and easy to manage because they are often deployed as turnkey solutions, and the backend is hosted and managed by the vendor. As it runs in a virtual environment, it is often easier to adapt to the needs of scale, providing more deployment flexibility and some room for adaptation to the unexpected increase in size. This scalability also offers a wide range of disaster recovery options, such as replenishing or enhancing virtual systems, NAS, bare metal recovery solutions, to provide an optimal deployment scenario. And most importantly, by making the whole process much simpler, the cloud service approach allows many overburdened IT organizations to get a true deployment of disaster recovery solutions in the first place.

Using a cloud service can also make the budget more reasonable. Reduce big capital costs by eliminating significant hardware costs. Instead, disaster recovery becomes a flexible, pay-as-you-go operating cost that companies pay only for the costs they incur, and they have the flexibility to reschedule or terminate specific services.

As a recovery service can also help ensure reliability. Since there is no upfront investment, so the beginning of the program is easier to test. In addition, cloud-based disaster recovery delivers robust levels of quality of service and uptime as well as verification of cloud-based backup data.

Cloud disaster recovery problems

However, there are still many challenges that companies must consider for their unique cloud-based disaster recovery. For example, placing your backup on a cloud service can result in more reliance on network availability. Likewise, with cloud-based disaster recovery, organizations can reduce the latency of transaction that can be generated by control throughput and any degraded performance. While this may not significantly affect the recovery of static files or mail, it can make cloud-based disaster recovery unsuitable for other scenarios, such as dynamic replication database recovery. The need to add extra bandwidth can also lead to unforeseen cost overruns.

Compliance can be another serious issue for many businesses considering cloud-based disaster recovery. Although cloud-based security and encryption technologies are mature, there may be gray areas when it comes to meeting regulatory standards such as healthcare or financial data.

Are you ready?

Ultimately, disaster recovery is about moving uncertainty to certainty. We can not determine when a disaster may occur, but we should and must identify the systems and procedures we are implementing to recover. To determine if your business is ready to move disaster recovery to cloud computing, you need to think about both your own business and your service provider. The viability of your business as a recovery service depends on business and technical standards.

From a business perspective, you have no disaster recovery solution in place by comparing the projected costs of cloud-based and traditional on-site disaster recovery, including equipment and people, with disastrous system failures that have a predictable business cost The expected cost of return on investment should be calculated.

As with any disaster recovery plan, you should determine your recovery time objective (RTO) where your core system must be restored in order to keep your business continuity revenue intact. You should also identify any system elements that have a negative impact through the latency of potential transactions. Specify what you need to meet the company's regulatory compliance requirements for specific industries, such as end-to-end dynamic and static data encryption or granular transactional data.

At the same time, consideration should also be given to what options businesses need to meet the recovery of specific business needs. Your business may require potential data recovery capabilities including file-based backup, multi-platform device and operating system support and archiving. Potential system recovery capabilities may include batch-based backups and the ability to quickly restart applications in cloud computing and subsequent phased recovery presets.

In the case of cloud service providers, companies need to verify that their service level agreements (SLAs) meet the business-defined business needs, especially in terms of reliability, performance, and compliance. Examine the hard-to-read terms and the expanded capacity or bandwidth by cost.

Also, make sure that businesses can safely store their data in the vendor's cloud service. Confirm the security and availability of vendor cloud data centers such as AES256 encrypted data, uninterrupted power supplies (UPS) and seismic ratings, and physical security measures such as biometric and motion-aware CCTV monitoring.

Technologies used by service providers can also provide businesses with additional solution feasibility insights. Consider that suppliers can provide comprehensive, fully functional services and centrally managed data and policies, as well as detailed reports, on a proven, established platform. By carefully evaluating these criteria, companies can clearly see if they need to use a cloud-based disaster recovery solution.

in conclusion

It is never a simple task to implement a disaster recovery solution. But for some companies, the advent of cloud-based disaster recovery can make it easier to afford this work. Whether your business is able to take advantage of these benefits will depend on your ability to seriously examine your organization's disaster recovery needs and match matching services. A sloppy decision will only add more uncertainty, not less uncertainty.