Cloud Solution: An Improvement on Disaster Recovery.

Have you had to lose some things, or everything, on your device because it was broken? Have you had to lose your favorite pictures, movies and the work documents on your computer because it crashed and all your eggs were in one basket? You will agree that disaster is the word that qualifies the situation. The thought of how and where to get the lost data back, and the time it would take, assuming they could be retrieved somehow, can be rather grueling. Some people can easily go on to replace the device and start afresh to acquire new data. However, businesses whose critical operations depend on the lost data, cannot go on, especially without a practicable disaster recovery plan.

What is disaster recovery?
Disaster recovery (DR) is the ability of an organization to respond to events that adversely affect its business in order to regain access to the functionality of its IT infrastructure after catastrophic events, like equipment failures, power outages, natural disasters, cyber attacks and other undesirable emergencies. Disaster recovery entails all the IT technologies and the best practices that are put together to either prevent or minimize the loss of data and business disruption that are witnessed after catastrophic events.

Without a dependable realistic disaster recovery plan, many businesses, especially small and medium scale ones, cannot protect themselves from the impact of notable disruptive events. Statistics have it that after experiencing a disaster, more than 40% of small businesses will not reopen, and 25% of those that do reopen will fail within a year following the crisis. According to Kyndryl, infrastructure failure can cost up to $100,000 per hour, while critical application failure can cost between $500,000 and $1 million per hour.

Backup, a critical part of disaster recovery
In order to reduce these costs dramatically, a disaster recovery plan should be strategic and well-planned in deploying appropriate technology. It will also involve continuous testing and maintaining backups of critical data. Although backup alone does not make for a full disaster recovery plan, it is a critical component of it. It ensures that adequate storage is available in order to maintain failover—that is, the process of offloading workloads to backup systems so that business operations and end-user experience are only disrupted as little as possible. It also ensures that failback, the process of switching back to the original primary systems, is timely. 

Backup is the replication of data and computing processes in an offsite location that is geographically remote to the primary onsite location so that in the events of any disaster a business can recover lost data from the second location where the data is backed up. After disruptive events, a business can transfer its computing power to a geographically remote location in order to continue its operations without lots of difficulty.

Before, many organizations depended on tapes and HDDs for backups. They maintained multiple copies of their data and stored at least a copy in an offsite location. However, now in the digitally changing world, tape and HDD backups in offsite repositories are no longer in vogue because the technique cannot achieve the necessary recovery time objective (RTO) a business needs to recover its critical operations. This is because a copy of the data is stored at a place that is geographically distant from the onsite location to prevent the data from getting affected by the same catastrophic events. Hence there are logistics limitations and network latency, which are prevalent across longer distances.  

Drawbacks of private data center backup
Many businesses do have data centers of their own, where they back up data in case of catastrophic events. However, small and medium business cannot afford this practice because of

the cost of hardware, power, labor, software, network, maintenance and administration,

the upfront cost of initial setup for disaster recovery environment, and

compatibility with the primary business environment and the task of ensuring that both of the environments have the same software versions, which doubles the software cost.  

Another germane thought to ponder when designing a disaster recovery plan is to ask whether when a significant event has impacted your primary office location, would the failover site, where your data is backed up, be distant enough to remain unaffected by the same event?

Advantages of cloud DR solution
Cloud solution to disaster recovery not only ensures monumental cost-savings, but also guarantees that your failover environment is completely remote to your primary office location. It has the adequate capacity to meet your combined needs. As a form of Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS), cloud DR is a popular, fast-growing, managed IT service available today. With it,

you will not have to worry about configuring and maintaining the failover environment; the cloud DR vendor takes care of all that for you;

You are rest assured of reduced RTO while cutting down logistic limitations and network latency;

You will save loads of money on equipment, staff and administration. 

Cloud solution ensures that disaster recovery is resilient and reliable—it provides enterprise-grade business continuity capabilities that can be deployed in on-premise, public and private sites. It delivers even a hybrid-cloud solution, with which you can save money and time!