How to Get Started with Cloud Disaster Recovery

Renju Thampy
Zmanda

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Cloud-based disaster recovery is something that businesses now use to host their data on the internet and servers instead of local storage elements, as it offers data integrity of the highest degree. Data security is a major priority for most organizations. The reality is, business data is always under threat. It can be a hacker’s attack, data loss due to natural disasters, or even an employee wipe out your critical files from an entire server.

It is essential to think about how these threats would impact your business. Are you willing to take these risks?

Cloud Disaster Recovery in Brief

Cloud-based storage and recovery solutions allow you to backup and restore your critical business files in case they are compromised.

Being highly flexible, Cloud technology enables efficient disaster recovery, irrespective of the type or intensity of workloads. The data is stowed in a secured cloud environment architected to provide high accessibility. Moreover, the service is not just available on-demand, but also allows organizations of different sizes to modify DR solutions according to their needs.

Cloud-based disaster recovery solutions are easy to set up and manage when compared to old traditional solutions. Businesses no longer need to fritter away time on transferring backup data from their tape drives or in-house servers to recover after a disaster. In crux, cloud automates these processes, guaranteeing fast and error-free data recovery.

Why the need for Cloud Disaster Recovery?

With companies continue adding new hardware and software applications/ services to their diurnal processes, related security risks are increasing at an alarming rate. Disasters are extemporaneous thus can leave a business devastated by massive data loss. If you can imagine the cost of a massive data loss can cause, then you will comprehend why data backup and recovery plan is the need of the hour.

Any businesses be it small or medium-sized, can bounce back from any security threats and natural disasters in no time with the help of cloud recovery solution. In addition, it minimizes the time needed to take workloads back online concurrently lowers the cost of a system failure.

Almost all the companies are now aware of the risk, but few actually make an effort to implement disaster recovery until it’ too late.

What are the Benefits?

  1. Easy to Use: Disaster recovery (DR) solutions can be tested and adopted in no time that too with very fewer efforts. When disaster strikes you don’t experience downtime but a considerable pressure to restart operations for business continuity. An easy to use DR solutions will help you in such scenarios.
  2. Scalability & Agility: You can increase or decrease the data storage capacity as per your requirements.
  3. Improved Data Protection: With cloud backup DR solutions in place you can recover and protect your data with top-notch security practices and encryption.
  4. Implementation in no time: Rapid deployment possible with set- up and configuration wizards.
  5. Go cloud, Go Green: Less energy consumption, reduced power costs, no need for large server rooms and reduced energy bills.

Disaster Recovery Options in Cloud

Data centers offer businesses with different options for data protection. In disaster cloud strategy, managed applications are popular components, as they store both primary production data and backup cases in the cloud which is managed by a provider. Thus companies no more need to depend on on-premises backups instead they can reap the benefits of the cloud in a usage-based model.

A hosted or managed recovery solution brings you a comprehensive cloud-based platform with the required hardware and software to support your operations. If you choose this as an option data and applications remain on-premises with only data backed up on the cloud infrastructure and restored as needed. This solution can be a cost-effective option when compared to other traditional options such as offsite, local data backup. However, the process to recover applications may be slow.

Many vendors offer cloud backup services, but it is recommended that businesses check with their respective vendors if this an option to make the implementation as easy as possible. Next viable option is to back up and restore data from the cloud infrastructure, i.e. data is stored to virtual machines in the cloud instead of on-premises servers, necessitating cloud storage and cloud computing services.

When a disaster strikes the restore process can be executed, or it can be recurring. Recurring backups are crucial when the recovery goals are short as it ensures data is kept up-to-date through resource sharing.

Replication to virtual machines in the cloud is a feasible DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) for the applications and data with short objectives. Replicating to the cloud means ensuring data and applications are protected in the cloud and on-premises.

Get Started with the Cloud Disaster Recovery

Once you have decided on the type of recovery solution you want, the next step is to look for options available with different providers and data centers.

Many vendors offer different types of pricing packages which may include a certain number of users, application backup, data backup, and frequency of backup.

Conclusion

Assess your needs and choose a managed cloud backup and disaster recovery provider accordingly. Discuss needs with all stakeholders in the business in all departments to determine critical data and applications to ensure business continuity.

Zmanda, with multiple services within the same platform allows partners to monetize their relationships with customers, making it easier to sell more, helping service providers to increase their revenue. It perfectly fits customers’ requirements by offering the ability to store data locally and on Amazon S3. Additionally, it can also replicate data to multiple locations, to help customers meet their regulatory compliance requirements.

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