How to Get Started with Cloud Disaster Recovery

Did you know that 32% of the total ransomware victims pay the ransom, in spite of it, they get just 65% of their data back?¹

Protection of digital assets is more crucial now than ever before.  You can lose your data due to several reasons, from cyber-attacks to natural disasters. Therefore, you need to protect your business with a well-tested disaster recovery plan that keeps your bottom-line stable no matter what.

Fortunately, cloud computing has made something as complex as disaster recovery quite effortless.  Cloud disaster recovery is something businesses can use to host their data on the internet. In addition,  it is an alternative to local storage elements, as it offers excellent data integrity.

What is Cloud Disaster Recovery?

Cloud disaster recovery is an approach to restore lost vital business data by leveraging cloud backup resources. It allows for high availability and uninterrupted process flows. 

Disaster recovery used to be an expensive proposition, with all the hardware, software, and employees needed to maintain it. However, cloud disaster recovery has eliminated this issue with its scalability. In addition, you can now pay-as-you-go for implementing your disaster recovery solution. In simpler words, you need not spend more money than what is needed to meet your requirements.

Why do you need Cloud Disaster Recovery?

No matter how small or large, data loss can turn into a severe problem for businesses nowadays. The time within which the business operations return to normal is also crucial. With so much riding on data security, having a robust disaster recovery plan is non-negotiable.

Out of the many approaches to disaster recovery, cloud disaster recovery offers a considerable advantage in terms of cost and uninterrupted access to data.

It even allows you to secure your data with low overhead and costs.  In addition, cloud disaster recovery will enable you to restore your critical data shortly. This matters a lot when a disaster strikes because the longer your business downtime is, the more money you lose.

Any business, be it small or medium-sized, can bounce back from any security threats and natural disasters in no time with the help of a cloud recovery solution.

What are the Benefits?

1. Easy to Use: Disaster recovery (DR) solutions can be tested and adopted in no time with minimal effort. When disaster strikes, you don’t experience downtime but considerable pressure to restart operations for business continuity. An easy-to-use DR solution 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 disaster recovery in the cloud solutions, you can recover and protect your data with top-notch security practices and encryption.

4. Implementation in no time: Rapid deployment with set-up and configuration wizards

5. Go cloud, Go Green: Less energy consumption, reduced power costs and, no need for large server rooms.

Comparing Cloud Disaster Recovery With Traditional Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery Options in Cloud

Data centers offer businesses different options for data protection. In cloud-based disaster recovery strategies, managed applications are popular components. They store both primary production data and backup cases in the cloud that a provider manages. Thus companies need not 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 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 compared to other traditional options such as offsite and 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 is an option to make the implementation as easy as possible. The next viable option is to back up and restore data from the cloud infrastructure. In simpler words, 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. 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.

Getting Started With the Cloud Disaster Recovery Solutions

Once you have decided on the type of disaster recovery in the cloud solution you want, the next step is to look for options available with different cloud disaster recovery services. There are quite a few options in the market, such as VMware cloud disaster recovery, google cloud disaster recovery, and oracle cloud disaster recovery.

Many vendors offer different 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 requirements with all stakeholders in all departments to determine critical data and applications to ensure business continuity. If possible, try negotiating with the cloud disaster recovery services based on your feature requirement.

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 the cloud like Amazon S3. It can also replicate data to multiple locations to help customers meet their regulatory compliance requirements.

Also, be sure to check out Rutgers Case Study: How the University Saved Tens of Thousands of Dollars

References:

[1]  Cybersecurity in 2022 – A Fresh Look at Some Very Alarming Stats