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Data is the most valuable asset of modern-day organizations. Its loss can result in irreversible damage to your business, including the loss of productivity, revenue, reputation, and even customers. It is hard to predict when a disaster will occur and how serious its impact will be. However, what you can control is the way you respond to a disaster and how successfully your organization will recover from it. Get to discover post how you can use disaster recovery in cloud computing for your benefit. This blog post attempts to answer the following questions:
Read further to discover what makes cloud computing the safest and most versatile approach to disaster recovery. Backup and Disaster Recovery in Cloud ComputingCloud computing is the on-demand delivery of computing services over the internet (more often referred to as ‘the cloud’) which operates on a pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud computing vendors generally provide access to the following services:
As you can see, each cloud computing service is designed to help you achieve different business needs. More so, cloud computing can considerably improve data the security and high availability of your virtualized workloads. Let’s discuss how you can approach disaster recovery in the cloud computing environment. Cloud disaster recovery vs. traditional disaster recoveryCloud disaster recovery is a cloud computing service which allows for storing and recovering system data on a remote cloud-based platform. To better understand what disaster recovery in cloud computing entails, let’s compare it to traditional disaster recovery. The essential element of traditional disaster recovery is a secondary data center, which can store all redundant copies of critical data, and to which you can fail over production workloads. A traditional on-premises DR site generally includes the following:
However, traditional disaster recovery can often be too complex to manage and monitor. Moreover, support and maintenance of a physical DR site can be extremely expensive and time-consuming. When working with an on-premises data center, you can expand your server capacity only by purchasing additional computing equipment, which can require a lot of money, time, and effort. Disaster recovery in cloud computing can effectively deal with most issues of traditional disaster recovery. The benefits include the following:
Why Choose Disaster Recovery in Cloud ComputingThe primary goal of disaster recovery is to minimize the overall impact of a disaster on business performance. Disaster recovery in cloud computing can do just that. In case of disaster, critical workloads can be failed over to a DR site in order to resume business operations. As soon as your production data center gets restored, you can fail back from the cloud and restore your infrastructure and its components to their original state. As a result, business downtime is reduced and service disruption is minimized. Due to its cost-efficiency, scalability, and reliability, disaster recovery in cloud computing has become the most lucrative option for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Generally, SMBs don’t have a sufficient budget or resources to build and maintain their own DR site. Cloud providers offer you access to cloud storage, which can become a cost-effective and long-lasting solution to data protection as well as disaster recovery. Data Protection with NAKIVO Backup & Replication NAKIVO Backup & Replication delivers high-end data protection for SMBs and enterprises with multiple backup, replication and recovery features, including VMware Backup, Hyper-V Backup, Office 365 Backup and more. Get the Free Trial now! How to Design a Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery PlanAfter considering the benefits of cloud computing in disaster recovery, it is time to design a comprehensive DR plan. In fact, you can read one of our blog posts which walks you through the entire process of a creating a DR plan. Below, we are going to discuss how to create a DR plan which works in the cloud environment. As a rule, an effective cloud-based DR plan should include the following steps:
Let’s discuss how disaster recovery planning works in cloud computing. Perform a risk assessment and business impact analysisThe first step in a disaster recovery planning in cloud computing is to assess your current IT infrastructure, as well as identify potential threats and risk factors that your organization is most exposed to. A risk assessment helps you discover vulnerabilities of your IT infrastructure and identify which business functions and components are most critical. At the same time, a business impact analysis allows you to estimate how unexpected service disruption might affect your business. Based on these estimations, you can also calculate the financial and non-financial costs associated with a DR event, particularly Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). The RTO is the maximum amount of time that IT infrastructure can be down before any serious damage is done to your business. The RPO is the maximum amount of data which can be lost as a result of service disruption. Understanding the RTO and RPO can help you decide which data and applications to protect, how many resources to invest in achieving DR objectives, and which DR strategies to implement in your cloud-based DR plan. Implement prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery measuresThe next step is to decide which prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery (PPRR) measures should be implemented in disaster recovery of the cloud computing environment. In a nutshell, PPRR measures can accomplish the following:
After you have determined which approach to disaster recovery to implement, you should choose a data protection solution capable of putting your DR plan into action and achieving DR objectives. Choose the solution which meets your business needs and complies with your infrastructure requirements. For this purpose, consider the following criteria:
Test and update your cloud-based DR planAfter you have created and documented the DR plan, you should run regular tests to see if your plan actually works. You can test whether business-critical data and applications can be recovered within the expected time frame. Testing a cloud-based DR plan can help you identify any issues and inconsistencies in your current approach to disaster recovery in cloud computing. After the test run, you can decide what your DR plan lacks and how it should be updated in order to achieve the required results and eliminate existing issues. Data Protection with NAKIVO Backup & Replication
NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a reliable, fast, and affordable data protection solution, capable of protecting virtualized as well as cloud environments. Let’s discuss in detail what NAKIVO Backup & Replication can do to ensure data protection and disaster recovery in cloud computing environments:
Request a live demo by one of our engineers to test the product in your virtual environment today and see for yourself the multiple benefits that NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides.
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