Thursday, December 20, 2018

Word of the Day: cloud disaster recovery

Word of the Day WhatIs.com
Daily updates on the latest technology terms | December 20, 2018
cloud disaster recovery

Cloud disaster recovery (cloud DR) is a backup and restore strategy that involves storing and maintaining copies of electronic records in a cloud computing environment as a security measure. The goal of cloud DR is to provide an organization with a way to recover data and/or implement failover in the event of a man-made or natural catastrophe.

There are a number of benefits that make cloud disaster recovery appealing, including the variety of ways it can be implemented: in-house, partially in-house or purchased as a service. This flexibility allows smaller enterprises to implement robust disaster recovery plans that would otherwise have been impossible. Typically, cloud providers charge for storage on a pay-per-use model, based on capacity, bandwidth or seat. Because the provider is in charge of purchasing and maintaining its storage infrastructure, the customer doesn't have to spend money on additional hardware, network resources, data center space and the personnel required to support them.

In addition to cost, there are other important issues to consider before adopting cloud-based disaster recovery:

  • Does the organization have the necessary bandwidth and network resources to move data fast enough between the primary site and the cloud?
  • Can the organization encrypt data in flight as it leaves the data center?

Failover, failback keys to cloud recovery

Effective cloud disaster recovery provides continuity for services and the ability to fail over to a second site if there is a hardware or software failure of IT systems. Workloads are then failed back to their original locations when the crisis is resolved. Failover and failback can be automated. Organizations should run tests at regular intervals on isolated network segments that do not impact production data.

Organizations can choose to fail over data, entire applications or virtual machine (VM) images. When data is failed over, it is available from file services in the cloud. However, cloud recovery can take a long time if there is a great deal of data. Application-based data can be replicated to another application running in the cloud. Or an entire VM image, including data, can be replicated to the cloud and powered up and accessed if there is an on-premises failover.

Cloud service-level agreements

Service-level agreements (SLAs) hold cloud providers accountable and establish recourses and penalties if providers don't live up to their promises about cloud services.

SLAs can call for the provider to reimburse customers with credits if there is a service outage or data cannot be recovered during a disaster. Customers can usually apply credits toward their cloud bill or a subscription to another service, but these credits seldom make up for the loss of business if cloud recovery is delayed. Customers should also study SLAs to help formulate an exit strategy for the service.

SLAs for cloud disaster recovery can include guarantees for uptime, recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives. For instance, an RTO can be from one hour up to 24 hours or even longer, depending on how important an application is to restore the business. The faster the guaranteed restore time, the more expensive the service costs.

Cloud disaster recovery providers, vendors

Because the cloud removes the need to maintain a second site, DR is considered a prime use case for the cloud. Disaster recovery requires failing applications over to the cloud and failing back, so hundreds of vendors have sprung up to offer cloud DR services. The leading cloud DR as a service vendors include Axcient, Bluelock, IBM Resiliency Services, iland, Microsoft Azure Site Recovery and SunGard Availability Services.

Traditional backup vendors, such as Acronis, Carbonite (EVault), Datto and Unitrends, have expanded into DR services. Amazon Web Services and VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery have also expanded into cloud DR. Other vendors providing cloud DR products and services include Databarracks, Windstream, Zerto and Zetta.

Quote of the Day

 
"Using multiple clouds in your disaster recovery strategy may be more difficult to implement, but it will also give your cloud plan an added level of reliability." - Brien Posey

Learning Center

 

Disaster recovery to cloud popular in 2018
Data continued to grow in 2018, along with costs to house that data and the risk of downtime in a disaster scenario. Learn how many companies turned to disaster recovery to cloud as a way to ensure business continuity and save money.

Google Cloud disaster recovery helped save data after Maria
Restaurant chain Grupo Col?n Gerena in Puerto Rico uses Scale Computing's HC3 Cloud Unity product for its Google Cloud disaster recovery plan in order to minimize downtime in the face of natural disasters.

Disaster recovery planning tools: Predictive analytics for DR
Want to peer into the future to identify potential threats? These days, there are disaster recovery planning tools available for that. Tap into the power of predictive analytics.

3 common disaster recovery challenges from 2018
In 2018, organizations faced a number of disaster recovery challenges. However, with every challenge comes a lesson. Here are three common DR sore spots and how to confront them in the new year.

Consider multi-cloud disaster recovery for added protection
Is a multiple cloud strategy right for you? With multi-cloud disaster recovery, less is not more. Using multiple clouds can give your organization's data an extra layer of protection in case of a disaster.

Quiz Yourself

 
The point of disaster recovery is the same for both large enterprises and _________ need to stay in business.
a. SMBs: They
b. SMBs; they

Answer

Stay in Touch

 
For feedback about any of our definitions or to suggest a new definition, please contact me at: mrouse@techtarget.com

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2 comments:

Rowelli Jorden said...

The cloud based disaster recovery is one of the best medium for the data back up which is quite every business need. Good one

StoneFlymen said...

Disaster recovery is essential for smooth business Running. backup and disaster recovery plan is must have thing for businesses to save their data from disasters.