Cloud computing has literally transformed the way businesses use their data. With technological advancements, cloud computing permits organizations to promote seamless accessibility and management opportunities for data and digital assets. But even with such advanced integration, the cloud is not immune to disasters.
As the era of cloud computing picks up, so does the need for ideal disaster recovery implementations. Around 54% of all organizations believe that ensuring data protection is paramount in pursuing cloud transformation.
Cloud-based disaster recovery is similar to the usual techniques but is way more efficient. It permits organizations to restore data and get operations back online within a short time window. Cloud computing has changed people’s attitudes toward disaster recovery.
Let’s find out how cloud engineering has the best approaches set for disaster recovery to make organizations migrate seamlessly to the cloud.
Understanding Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery
The purpose of cloud disaster recovery is to allow organizations to back up and recover important business data. Cloud computing integrates various services and strategies to back up data, computing resources, and apps to respective cloud providers or public clouds.
All your valuable enterprise resources are protected under the IaaS approach of the cloud. The data gets stored on the offsite servers. As a result, your organization will be able to recover from any form of disaster and maintain business continuity.
Cloud engineering fuels disaster recovery within your cloud computing adaptation to promote high availability, flexibility, and faster recovery. Irrespective of your business requirements, you get to tailor disaster recovery approaches accordingly.
To help you better understand the potential of cloud computing in the arena of disaster recovery, here are some of its methodologies, which include:
- Backup and Restore- Fastest and significantly cheapest ways to recover data through cloud-based recovery approaches. Moreover, it also helps in mitigating regional events, such as natural disasters, by moving the data to different geographical locations.
- Warm Standby- Cloud computing enables organizations to obtain a scaled-down version of a completely functional business environment. The scaled-down version will constantly run alongside the actual environment in a different geographic location, far from the central server. In this way, the organization will always have a backup version in a separate location in case of disasters.
- Pilot Testing- With this methodology of cloud-based disaster recovery, your organization can replicate the core services associated with its business functions. Therefore, you must replicate just a small part of your IT structure. It will enable you to access a stable replacement for important functions in case of any disaster.
Why choose disaster recovery through cloud computing over a traditional approach?
With traditional disaster recovery approaches, organizations need a second physical location or extra software or hardware solutions to support critical operations. The physical site will act as an additional center for data storage. Following that, traditional disaster recovery demands manual operations from dedicated personnel in case of any interruption or data loss.
On the other hand, cloud disaster recovery is similar to that of cloud computing solutions. It allows companies to store and recover business-critical data from a unified remote platform. Moreover, cloud computing permits you to automate disaster recovery attributes, easing some stress at critical times. Thus, it is more convenient than the traditional disaster recovery approach.
Perks of Switching to Cloud Computing and its Disaster Recovery Solutions
Natural, human, and technical disasters are the three types that might compromise business data and affect it adversely. Cloud engineering and disaster recovery will cover disasters incurred by the business infrastructure components, such as hardware, software, networks, and facilities.
So, there are ample advantages for you to switch to cloud computing and adapt its disaster recovery methodologies. Some of the practical perks are as follows:
1. Exceptional Scalability
With cloud-based disaster recovery, you won’t have to install additional software or hardware systems to ensure scalability. Cloud services offered by a professionally managed service provider allow you to choose the “pay-as-you-go” model.
With it, you will have the flexibility to either increase or decrease the resources, depending on your current requirements. Hence, this will optimize your costs when the machines aren’t live.
2. Less Down-Time
Manual recovery procedures with traditional disaster recovery would incur a lot of losses due to prolonged business downtime.
With cloud transformation, you enable your organization to operate within the cloud and restore critical data quickly in times of disaster. As a result, you will be back online faster, reducing the overall downtime. Your business won’t be affected for long, and the loss will be greatly minimized.
3. Enabling Automation Capabilities
Built-in automation and orchestration functionalities enable cloud computing. Hence, this enhances its disaster recovery potential by reducing manual efforts. Following that, the number of recovery processes that you need to execute and maintain is optimally reduced.
For instance, enabling automation will increase the cloud server resources when the overall load exceeds 90%. Thus, it improves the resilience of your company against any potential disaster.
Steps on Planning an Effective Cloud Computing Disaster Recovery Strategy
When you are planning out your cloud-based disaster recovery strategy, these steps are of utmost consideration:
- You should know your business infrastructure over the cloud and outline the potential risks. Evaluate your data storage needs, and determine their importance for ensuring business continuity.
- Conduct a proper analysis of business impact. It will help you understand the weak links within your business’s operations during a disaster. While conducting such an analysis, you should consider the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).
- Pick the right cloud service provider to assist you in implementing cloud computing and its disaster recovery methodologies. The provider you choose should ensure simple setup, good recovery speed, reliability, security compliance, setup & recovery.
- Build cloud-based disaster recovery by migrating data to the cloud, enabling access management, and implementing user authentication. Take all necessary security measures to minimize the possibility of experiencing disasters.
- Keep testing the disaster recovery plan periodically to ensure it is effective over time.
Conclusion
Disaster recovery planning is crucial for businesses as they transform their businesses digitally. Hence, cloud computing makes its implementation easy by allowing streamlined backup and recovery processes. Following that, organizations get the flexibility to determine the type of recovery plans their business needs with the help of RTO and RPO.
Most small and medium companies are also inclining towards utilizing cloud-based data recovery to ensure efficiency and cost savings.
If you are in search of a proficient service provider to help you implement cloud computing and disaster recovery services, then get in touch with STL Digital right away!
FAQs
1. Why choose disaster recovery within cloud computing?
Choosing disaster recovery associated with cloud computing enables you to run a flexible business with reduced complexity and downtime. Cloud-based disaster recovery works exactly the same as cloud computing services. Hence, organizations can be flexible in storing and recovering their business data through the remote platform.
2. What is the best method for cloud computing disaster recovery?
The best method for cloud computing disaster recovery is the backup and restore approach. Most businesses implement it to back up crucial data offsite in the cloud. With this approach, companies need to back up their data frequently to ensure it stays up-to-date or enable automation to make the process even more hassle-free.
3. Are there any drawbacks to cloud-based disaster recovery?
The cloud-based disaster recovery approach is not considered a good solution for organizations with limited network bandwidth. The internet connection is quite crucial for making it work! In addition, companies with very little data to store and back up will have to pay a hefty charge for disaster recovery planning in the cloud.
In short, if your business is highly dependent on data, without which the organization will crumble, you should invest in a quality disaster recovery plan in the cloud. Restricting the budget at the expense of your company isn’t a fair deal.
