Cloud disaster recovery is a means by which an organization can recover data or use a failover to maintain their regular operations in times of either minor or major system failures, or when the need arises. It is a replication and restore option that keeps electronic records in the cloud. DR in the cloud is quickly becoming a favoured option by organisations, due to its flexibility and ease of use for organisations and individuals alike.
Cost benefits are the first clear reasons for its popularity. By using the cloud, organisations skip the need to grow their in-house infrastructure for storing and managing their recovery data. The charges incurred by vendors are usually for storage per-use for capacity and bandwidth required by the client.
Having said that, not all cloud providers are the same and therefore the business owner should be clear on their goals in finding the right option for their needs. While Service Level Agreements signed would hold providers accountable for lost time or data, effectively, having a dependable cloud DR that provides continuity while failing over, is the basic requirement that should be fulfilled so as while the problem is being rectified, work and business can continue seamlessly. Once the catastrophe has been settled, the workloads can fail back to its original systems.
Though the name suggests disaster recovery, meaning in case of a negative occurrence towards the business’ normal operations, there are instances where organisations could use the option outside those parameters. Companies like Zerto provide software that enables replication and automatic recovery of production workloads—both to and from— public and hybrid clouds, rather than merely disaster recovery. This enables enterprises to achieve greater IT resilience with flexibility and mobility across disparate infrastructures and cloud platforms. So clients can easily upgrade or downgrade IT infrastructures, move location or run tests on parts of their system, or fail over – all by a touch of a button.
