In today’s growing economic world technology is one of the most important aspects that enable development. Data is the most valuable asset of any organization and the loss of data can result in damaging outcomes for businesses that are irreversible and can cause much chaos in daily operations. Hence it is close to impossible to predict when a disaster can occur and access its impact.
What can be controlled is how well you can make arrangements to respond to a disaster and how quickly and successfully one can recover from it with a strategic disaster recovery service.
We are in a connected environment where businesses are connected to every entity that is involved in the operational as well as the delivery of products and services including customers. This is enabled by cloud computing and hence it has helped us to achieve different business needs. Cloud computing not only improves the security of data but also the high availability of your virtualized workloads thereby ensuring that all are connected all the time.
Cloud computing is very much an on-demand delivery of computing service delivered over the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis. Generally, cloud computing services are provided in the following forms:
- Software as a service (SaaS) that allows customers to access software applications that are hosted on the cloud.
- Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) allowing us to rent IT infrastructure, including servers, storages, and network components, from the cloud vendor.
- Platform as a service (PaaS) where one can rent a computing platform from the cloud provider for developing, testing, and configuring software applications.
Hence as mentioned earlier cloud computing services are designed with a purpose to achieve different business requirements.
What is Disaster Recovery in Cloud computing and how is it different from Traditional DR?
Cloud disaster recovery can be explained as a computing service that facilitates us in storing as well as recovering data on a remote cloud-based platform. One can better understand cloud disaster recovery only when a traditional recovery model is better understood.
Traditional Disaster Recovery:
In any traditional disaster recovery, one of the most important elements is a secondary data center that is built and equipped to store copies of critical data. This is used as typical failover workloads and has to be stored in the most secure infrastructural facilities. Many elements make a traditional DR site as follows:
- One needs a dedicated infrastructure and facility to house the equipment like servers and other computing devices.
- A single dedicated server or more than one server to ensure to facilitate high-level operational performances. The infrastructure should be able to scale up or down as per requirements.
- Dedicated high-speed internet connectivity is a must with good bandwidths that will enable the use of remote access to the data center.
- A well-planned network infrastructure with state of the art firewalls, routers, and switches. This is to ensure a very stable fault-tolerant and reliable connectivity to the facility.
Let us try to understand some of the issues that are present in a traditional disaster recovery facility.
Issues with Traditional Disaster Recovery:
There are very pertinent issues in having a traditional disaster recovery facility as many times it is too complete and needs technically qualified personnel to install, manage and maintain the same. This can be very expensive and time-consuming as one has to invest in the support staff. Moreover, the server cannot be running without any upgradations as performance levels can come down with every day of handling the manifold quantity of data. This means server capacity expansions can be made only by purchasing additional computing devices and equipment. Purchases require good investments, time and efforts.
Advantages of Cloud Disaster Recovery:
Many of the downfalls that a traditional disaster recovery faces can be aptly dealt with a cloud disaster recovery setup. Let us try to highlight some of the major advantages of Cloud Disaster Recovery.
- One of the biggest advantages is that you don’t need to build a secondary site and invest in buying hardware and software. All you have to do is enhance your virtual cloud storage or upgrade your server capacity which happens in a few minutes.
- Scaling up or down is a cakewalk as it is very easy to add up cloud computing resources depending on your current business needs.
- Disaster recovery in cloud computing is the easiest and can be performed from anywhere within minutes with the only requirement being to be facilitated with internet connectivity.
- A very affordable pay as you go pricing structure that facilitates payment only for the cloud computing services that are used for.
- Another most viable feature is cloud computing gives us the facility of being able to store backed-up data across multiple locations all across the globe if necessary. This allows us to keep a backup copy in a scenario of a cloud center failure.
- Being able to instantly identify any issues or errors with notifications is another feature of cloud disaster recovery and it also supports a 24/7 support and maintenance of your cloud storage with regular hardware and upgrades from the cloud provider.
Final thoughts:
Cloud computing is the most flamboyant technological evolutions that this field has seen. And as more and more server get migrated onto the cloud it is imperative to say that disaster recovery services are also been shifted onto the cloud platform. It is not advisable to invest on an in-house disaster recovery data centre as it will only cost a fraction of the investments for cloud disaster recovery infrastructure with exponential returns in terms of service quality and reliability assurances.
