Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

In the current business world, data is the most valuable asset, and a disaster involving data loss results in several irreversible damages to an enterprise. Those damages include the loss of revenue, productivity, reputation, and even loyal customers. Disasters and their severity are hard to predict. Anyway, you can control how you respond to a disaster, and your response determines how successful your enterprise will recover from it. 

The adoption of cloud computing services has been rising since the COVID-19 pandemic. A recent survey revealed that 67% of enterprises adopted cloud infrastructure by the end of 2021. Cloud computing services deliver on-demand Information Technology (IT) services from storage to applications to processing power via the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis. An enterprise can access all those IT assets by paying a fee rather than owning IT infrastructure or data centers. 

Here, let’s take a look at Cloud Disaster Recovery (CDR) and how you can use it to your advantage. 

Cloud Disaster Recovery: What is It? 

CDR is a cloud-based service that quickly recovers your enterprise’s critical systems after a disaster and gives you remote access to your IT resources in a highly secure virtual ecosystem. 

Conventional disaster recovery involves managing a secondary data center, a time-consuming yet expensive process. However, cloud disaster recovery has transformed the status quo by eliminating the need for traditional IT infrastructure and bringing down downtime significantly. According to the 2021 Data Protection Report by Veeam, the average downtime cost is roughly $85,000 per hour. And, the cost entirely depends on the size of the business organization – the larger the size, the larger the cost, and vice versa. 

The Working of Cloud Disaster Recovery Explained 

To understand the working of cloud disaster recovery, we should compare it with conventional disaster recovery. As mentioned earlier, the crucial element of conventional disaster recovery is a secondary data center where you can store all redundant copies of critical data and to which you can fail over workloads. 

A conventional on-premises disaster recovery system generally includes the elements mentioned below. 

• A dedicated ecosystem facilitates IT infrastructure, including maintenance, employees, and computing devices.
• Adequate server capacity for higher levels of operational performance that also allow scalability depending on the business needs. 
• Internet connectivity with ample bandwidth allows remote access to the secondary data centers. 
• IT network infrastructure, including firewalls, routers, and switches, are implemented to provide data availability and a reliable link between the primary and secondary data centers. 

Conventional disaster recovery is often too complex to manage and monitor. More than that, maintenance and support of a physical on-premises DR site can be costly and time-consuming. For example, the expansion of the server capacity of an on-premises data center can only be done by purchasing additional computing devices and IT resources, which demands a lot of money, time, and effort. 

The Advantages of Cloud Disaster Recovery 

Cloud disaster recovery can effectively deal with most issues of conventional disaster recovery. Some of the advantages of CDR are mentioned below. 

• Eliminates the need for a secondary on-premises physical site and the purchasing of additional hardware and software to carry out critical operations. 
• Scalability of IT resources per the business needs 
• The affordable pay-as-you-go pricing model requires you to pay only for the cloud computing services you use. 
• CDR can be performed in minutes from anywhere in the world over any computing device connected to the internet. 
• The backup of data across multiple geographical locations eliminates the possibility of a single point of failure. Even if one cloud-based data center fails, you can still retrieve a backup copy of your critical data. 
• Cloud-based state-of-the-art IT network infrastructure ensures that the cloud services provider quickly identifies and rectifies any issues or errors. Moreover, the cloud service provider provides 24/7 support and maintenance of the cloud storage and consistent updating of hardware, software, and cybersecurity features. 

Disaster recovery in the cloud is increasingly becoming a popular choice for small and medium-scale businesses looking to implement a robust business continuity strategy. With CDR, setting up a separate data center for backup is no longer required. Moreover, there is no need to install and maintain separate DR tools, which brings down costs while providing businesses access to continuous, scalable DR services.