Cloud Disaster Recovery

Jan 05, 2024

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Originally Posted On: https://nfina.com/cloud-disaster-recovery/

In today’s technology-driven world, data is the lifeblood of any business. Losing it can be catastrophic and lead to severe consequences. Natural disasters, cyber-attacks, power outages are just a few examples of events that may cause loss of data and bring businesses to their knees. This is where cloud disaster recovery comes into play. Cloud disaster recovery ensures that critical business data remains safe and recoverable even in the face of unexpected disturbances or failures. In this blog post, we will dive deep into what cloud disaster recovery is all about, its importance, benefits as well as drawbacks – everything you need to know.

How Does Cloud Disaster Recovery Work?

The goal of cloud disaster recovery is the same as that of traditional disaster recovery: to protect and recover valuable business assets. You can think of disaster recovery (DR) as an insurance policy designed to protect your business from disruptions caused by unexpected events. Disaster recovery involves backing up and recovering cloud-based data, applications, and systems.

A cloud-based disaster recovery solution replicates your critical data and applications to remote servers or storage maintained by a third party. You will be able to access backup copies of everything you need to keep running in case something goes wrong with your primary IT infrastructure.

Cloud disaster recovery has the advantage of being scalable: businesses can easily customize disaster recovery plans according to their size and complexity.

Some cloud disaster recovery systems offer automated failover: when a disruption occurs, it automatically switches to the backup environment, allowing quick recovery times without human intervention. Overall, any disaster recovery solution whether traditional or cloud disaster recovery offers businesses peace-of-mind knowing that should anything happen, they are prepared.

Importance of Disaster Recovery

DR is a central component of any business continuity strategy. It involves replicating data and applications between the primary and backup infrastructures.

With the rise of cyber-attacks, data breaches, natural disasters, and system failures, disaster recovery has become a critical part of all business operations. It is important for your business to have a disaster recovery plan in place because it ensures that your business remains operational even in the face of adversity.

In summary, having a solid cloud disaster recovery strategy gives businesses peace-of-mind knowing that they are prepared for unforeseen events while ensuring seamless continuity of operations with minimal downtime or loss of revenue.

Approaches to Cloud Disaster Recovery

The following are the three main approaches to cloud disaster recovery:

Cold Disaster Recovery typically involves storing data or virtual machine images. These resources can only be used if additional steps are taken, such as downloading the data or loading the image into a virtual machine. While cold disaster recovery is the simplest solution — often just data storage — and the least expensive, it takes the longest to recover, resulting in the longest downtime for the business.

Warm Disaster Recovery is typically used as a contingency plan, in which the primary data center’s data and applications are duplicated at a cloud-based DR provider. These systems can remain idle until an emergency occurs; if one does, it won’t take long for the warm DR to become functional. Just start up virtual machines and direct IP addresses and traffic towards secondary resources. Even with this speedy recovery process, some downtime will still occur for affected systems.

Hot Disaster Recovery involves running data and workloads simultaneously in parallel during a live deployment. Basically, the primary and the DR sites share the same workloads and data running in synchronization — both sites share a portion of the overall application traffic. Users are unaware of the disruption when disaster strikes one site. Hot DR has no downtime, but it can be the most expensive and complicated method.

Benefits of Cloud DR

Cloud disaster recovery services are not limited to a specific location. Organizations can choose to host their backup facility virtually anywhere in the world, irrespective of their physical location. In the event of a disaster, all servers and other equipment located in the physical building would be at risk.

One of the advantages of cloud disaster recovery is its ability to scale according to a business’s needs. In case of an emergency, this feature ensures that businesses can quickly recover their data without worrying about capacity constraints. Additionally, as more data is generated over time, it becomes much easier for businesses to expand their storage capacity without having to invest in additional hardware.

Moreover, implementing cloud-based disaster recovery also means that businesses no longer need to worry about maintaining physical infrastructure or managing backup tapes manually. This not only saves money but also frees up IT staff time so that they can focus on other critical tasks.

Drawbacks of Cloud DR

Cloud disaster recovery has the major drawback that you rely on the infrastructure of your service provider and their ability to quickly recover your data in case of an outage. This can pose a risk if the provider suffers from downtime.

Connectivity to the internet. Cloud DR requires a consistent internet connection, which can be difficult in poor internet access areas.

Less favorable RTOs and RPOs that traditional replication.

It can be challenging to set up and maintain a cloud disaster recovery system. Most small and midsize organizations do not have staff with the specialized knowledge required to maintain cloud DR. This forces them to hire a third-party provider to setup and manage.

It’s possible to become dependent on third-party providers and risk vendor lock-in. This means you lose control over disaster recovery if you become dependent on their service. It can be difficult for organizations to avoid vendor lock-in once their data has been migrated to a cloud-based disaster recovery service.

High cost of the cloud. With all the marketing and hype about the cloud, it may seem like a cheaper alternative to setting up and maintaining an on-premises IT infrastructure. Monthly cloud subscription fees can add up over time, especially as storage and bandwidth needs increase. A large volume of data can be costly to move to and from the cloud. Adding cloud disaster recovery is only going to increase the already extravagant cost of the cloud.

There are security and privacy concerns associated with cloud DR. Since cloud providers have access to customer data, unauthorized personnel can gain access to user data. Opting for zero-knowledge providers who maintain a high level of confidentiality can sometimes avoid this.

Conclusion

If you’re already in the cloud, you need cloud disaster recovery. You must protect your organization from lost revenue associated with down time.

If you’re considering moving to the cloud, you need to consider a hybrid cloud solution. Nfina’s Hybrid Cloud solution is the perfect alternative to the public hyperscale cloud, offering more benefits than the public cloud without the cost and complexity. There are many benefits to consider with Nfina’s solution versus traditional public cloud or traditional compute and storage clusters. These include:

Workload Agility

Allows for seamless migration between sites as your business grows.
Incremental migration and application modernizationallow you to move to the cloud at your pace.
Geographic redundancy is built into the architecture.
Higher performance allows you to put the apps requiring lower latency in the private cloud.
Cost savings allow the user to shift workloads to the most cost-effective site.
Scalability allows for rapid cloud expansion if necessary.

Security – Nfina’s Hybrid Cloud Platform allows for multiple copies in geo-redundant locations. It also allows well-vetted cyber-security solutions to be hosted on-premise as required for very sensitive data and certain regulated industries.

Backup and Disaster Recovery – Nfina’s Backup and DR solution includes geo-redundant data backup and disaster recovery. All of Nfina’s storage products (Hybrid Cloud, hyperconverged, hyperconverged clusters, SAN, and NAS) support immutable snapshots ensuring ransomware protection.

Cost Savings – Nfina’s Hybrid Cloud customers experience up to 50% savings versus public cloud solutions.