When a disaster strikes, businesses suffer from downtime that can impact revenue and reputation. This can be due to hardware failure, software bugs, natural phenomena, or cyberattacks. In such cases, having a disaster recovery plan for cloud services is essential. A cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) solution is faster, more cost-effective, and offers greater flexibility than traditional on-site DR models.
The first step in developing a disaster recovery plan for cloud services is to conduct a risk assessment and impacts analysis of the organization’s existing IT infrastructure and workloads. This helps to discover vulnerabilities in the system and prioritize critical workloads that must be protected from disasters. It also helps the organization to define the RTO and RPO requirements for its DR strategy.
Once an organization has defined its RTO and RPO, it can choose from a variety of DR strategies that best meet its needs. The most basic approach is backup and restore, which uses periodic backup copies of an application to be restored in the event of a disaster. This option has the lowest cost and the shortest RTO but is limited to the availability of the backup copy in the recovery site.
Another type of DR is disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), in which an organization uses a third party to back up its IT infrastructure in the cloud and provide all the DR orchestration. Unlike backup as a service, which duplicates data but not the processing capabilities of an IT environment, DRaaS protects against both logical and physical disasters. It can also scale up and down to accommodate the business’s changing IT needs.
A third option is multi-site deployment, in which the IT infrastructure of an organization is replicated across multiple regions of a cloud provider’s network. This provides the fastest and most complete protection against a disaster, but is expensive. It also requires a high-speed wide area network (WAN) connection to ensure that backup data can be quickly and securely transferred between the primary and secondary sites.
When choosing a DR solution, it’s important to select a trusted partner that has experience in supporting the unique IT infrastructure of your organization. Buchanan Technologies has over 30 years of experience serving organizations of all sizes in the US and abroad. We can help you select and implement the best DR solution for your cloud-based infrastructure. Contact us today to get started. We’ll be happy to discuss your specific business needs and help you develop a DR strategy that will keep your cloud services up and running no matter what the situation. We offer a free consultation to all customers. This is a great way to see if we are the right fit for your company. We will also give you a quote that is free of charge and without any obligations. We look forward to hearing from you soon!