What Are Cloud Disaster Recovery Services?
Cloud disaster recovery services enable your company to fail over your critical workloads to the cloud in the event of a data center outage or other business-affecting catastrophe. This means that you can resume operations without any disruption as soon as your production data centers recover. In addition, many DRaaS solutions offer WAN-optimized replication that doesn’t impact your production workloads, as well as global data deduplication to save on storage costs.
This service is part of your business continuity (BC) strategy and provides a high availability solution for a variety of applications. You can choose from a variety of deployment options, depending on your RTO and RPO requirements. For example, you may want to have the infrastructure back up in a different physical location than your primary site to mitigate the impact of local natural disasters. In addition, you can deploy multi-site DR to minimize downtime if one availability zone fails in the same region as your primary data center.
Most DRaaS providers provide a pay-as-you-go model, allowing you to scale up or down as needed and only pay for the service you use. Additionally, built-in orchestration and automation simplify the implementation, maintenance, and execution of your DR plan and help you to reduce operational risk.
What Are Disaster Recovery Services?
Traditionally, a DR solution involved storing backup copies of your infrastructure at a remote site to avoid losing the ability to process data in the event of a disaster. This required careful planning and testing to make sure that your IT infrastructure could failover to the remote environment instantly. It was also expensive because you had to pay for the space and bandwidth to replicate your backups to the remote environment.
Cloud-based DR is changing all of that. It minimizes dependencies on physical infrastructure by abstracting hardware used to create VMs for you. This allows you to fail over to the cloud for instant processing, while preserving your existing infrastructure. In addition, most DRaaS providers offer SLAs that guarantee your RTO and RPO requirements.
Another advantage is that you can use a virtual machine to replicate your applications, as opposed to replicating the physical hardware they run on. This means that you can run a virtual image of your physical servers in the cloud, making it easy to revert back to a previous version of your application, even if your hardware is unreliable. This approach is typically the most cost-effective option.
A downside of this approach is that your organization may become dependent on a single vendor for DR. This can be avoided by choosing zero-knowledge providers that maintain a high level of confidentiality. Another issue is that your data can be exposed to unauthorized personnel if the provider fails.
Disaster recovery plays a critical role in your BC strategy and should be part of a holistic approach. You should include it in your BC planning for all scenarios, including natural disasters, human disasters (e.g., accidental data loss), and technical disasters (e.g., outages or malware attacks).
