Moving your disaster recovery (DR) to the cloud is a big decision. Making that decision is just the start; there are lots of other decisions you need to make now.
Public or Private Cloud?
One big decision is whether to use a private cloud for DR or the public cloud. Private cloud gives you more control and more flexibility than you’re likely to have if you use public cloud. Because you are the only user of your private cloud, you may experience better performance during a major disaster that causes lots of companies to invoke their cloud DR simultaneously. However, public cloud DR is usually a cheaper solution.
What Kind of DR in the Cloud?
Now that you know where you’ll failover to, you need to decide what kind of failover you’ll support. There are several different options for your cloud-based DR strategy:
- Cloud backup for secondary site recovery. Keep your primary and secondary sites but use the cloud as your backup destination, replacing your current off-site backups. Numerous backup tools integrate with cloud and simplify this process. It’s important to assess whether bandwidth will support the desired recovery time objective if you need to restore a large volume of data. You should also evaluate the cost of this, as getting data out of the cloud may incur additional costs.
- Cloud backup and recovery. As in the above option, you keep your primary site and use the cloud as your backup destination. But instead of recovering by restoring files to your own secondary site, you recover to instances in the cloud. You can either bring the cloud instances up only when needed or keep them up at all times to make the recovery process quicker. Replication to instances in the cloud supports tight recovery objectives.
- Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). Get the benefits of cloud backup and recovery with vendor support and automation by using DRaaS.
- Cloud applications with cloud DR. Failing over to cloud is simpler if your primary site is already in the cloud. With this option, you migrate your applications to the cloud and take advantage of the cloud provider’s service level agreement to ensure availability.
What Do You Need to Make It Work?
Once you’ve decided on your cloud DR strategy, there are a number of factors to be addressed:
- Making DR in the cloud secure. Data needs to be secured at all times, so you need security strategies that cover the copy of data to the cloud, the storage of data in the cloud, and the usage of data in the cloud if you recover to cloud-based instances.
- Providing adequate bandwidth. The bandwidth that supports getting data to the cloud may not be adequate for getting data out of the cloud or using it in the cloud. Bandwidth needs to be sufficient to support the full user load or the complete download of data to be restored on local devices.
Are you thinking about taking your DR to the cloud? dcVAST can help you think through these questions and make the right choices to support your business. Contact us to learn more about which cloud-based DR strategy is right for you.
