Cloud-based disaster recovery offers enterprise IT managers a compelling alternative to the time and cost involved in legacy approaches. In the past, disaster recovery preparedness required substantial time and financial investment and for many, DR was out of reach. Today, cloud-based DR is positioned to wake up legacy approaches and offer frustrated infrastructure and operations professionals a compelling alternative.
Instead of enterprises buying resources in case of a disaster, cloud computing offersapay-per-use pricing model allowing them to pay for long-term data storage while only paying for servers during testing or in the event of a disaster. This provides significant cost reduction and removes several barriers to entry for many firms looking for faster recovery than what they can receive from tape.
To help narrow down the information, there are three main categories of cloud-based DR solutions:
-- Do It Yourself in the cloud involves using a third-party provider's cloud to architect a custom solution leveraging the agility and speed of the cloud. For infrastructure and operations professionals who are very confident in their expertise in both cloud and DR, DIY approach is a flexible and cost-effective option.
-- DR-as-a-service solutions are prepackaged services that provide a standard DR failover to a cloud environment that you can buy on a pay-per-use basis with varying rates based upon your recovery point objective and recovery time objective.
-- Cloud-to-cloud disaster recovery is the ability to failover infrastructure from one cloud data center to another, either within a single vendor's environment or across multiple vendors.
Like any emerging solution or service, there are special considerations that early adopters must understand upfront. For infrastructure, operations managers and business professionals who have complained that DR feels a lot like very expensive insurance, cloud-based DR could make a lot of sense given the prospect of easier, more frequent, and less expensive testing, as well as pay-as-you-go-pricing.
If implementing cloud-based DR isn't on your infrastructure road map, now is the time to begin investigating it. If you're already on the path to adopting cloud-based DR, here are some recommended best practices:
- Not every application in your portfolio will be an ideal fit for DR in the cloud. Start with applications that have a strong track record of performance in your virtual environment but aren't supporting your most critical systems.
- Understand the service-level agreements of your solution so you don't receive any unwelcome surprises.
- To really take advantage of the cloud economic model, infrastructure and operations professionals must scrutinize the amount of resources needed during recovery and try to keep this.
- One significant benefit of running your DR infrastructure in the cloud is that it makes testing those components less expensive and disruptive. Understanding interdependencies between applications as they span traditional and cloud-based recovery will be critical to ensure smooth operations after failover.
Haley
