Cloud Computing is already thriving in the market. Numerous enterprises are already benefitting from the low cost and easy-to-access options. However, IT cost reductions, and easy scalability is by far the primary decision-maker for working in the cloud. Still, the most prominent feature is disaster recovery. Cloud vendors are on the verge of making a disaster recovery process easier, faster, and more cost-effective.

In almost every recent survey for IT trends; it shows that secondary backups and disaster recovery, in particular, are highly persuading cloud use cases; and are often the first forays of an organization into the cloud.

Disaster recovery plans in cloud computing have transformed the way we approach our data. With this, you can make bolder and more profitable decisions by knowing the fact that you have a fast and efficient contingency plan as much needed support.

Disaster Recovery Importance

What is Disaster Recovery?

For cloud computing, IT policies, tools, and procedures come under the roof of the disaster recovery plan. It ensures that your business infrastructure and systems should function despite disruptive events such as natural disasters, cyber-attacks, or even planned upgrades/maintenance that require shutting down production infrastructures. DR maintains the business continuity objectives by instantly restoring your infrastructure, applications, and data. The critical factor in any DR plan is data replication.

In always-connected global networking, users expect apps and services to be available for 24/7/365.

According to the latest IT trends, 31% of enterprises have experienced an outage in the last 12 months. These enterprises have faced an average downtown of 95 minutes per outage that has cost them at an average of $8,850/minute.

As you can see, the direct impact of an outage is significantly high. Also, Indirect costs in the form of lost customer, business opportunities, and productivity, as well as the damage of brand reputation, can be more damaging than any tangible loss. Regardless of the cause, when disasters strike – fast recovery – is essential.

Major Challenges

Disaster recovery, in cloud deployment, is a very critical issue for a business. It is also essential to maintain redundant data sets to comply with long term data retention regulation. Nevertheless, the cost of setup, testing, and maintenance of a disaster recovery site in a failover are very high; especially since the company never hopes to use the replicated site. Other major challenges are

• Identify and maintain the minimal DR data footprint that will provide adequate protection at minimal data replication costs.
• Continuous synchronization of the data between the production center and DR replication site.
• To establish a seamless and automated process for any failover or failback.
• Assigning the professionals and IT resources to test the DR site/environment on a regular interval to ensure that it will work fine if and when needed.

To meet these challenges, organizations of all sizes frequently try to implement their DR strategies by leveraging on-demand public cloud compute, network, and storage resources.

It allows them to reduce their data center footprints and costs, shift CAPEX and OPEX, enhance data safety, and get benefits from limitless scalability.

Summary

Disaster recovery is a business imperative; organizations are focusing on optimizing their disaster recovery strategies to provide a bullet-proof cover at a minimal cost. In this tussle, the cloud plays a vital role in DR, offering services that leverage global data centers and have flexible storage tiering for cost-effective yet robust DR replication targets.

For complete assurance, you should plan to test failover and disaster recovery at a regular interval of time with your mission-critical application vendors in the same way that you would be testing your systems for failover and recovery. Since it is the only way to know that your DR will work if any failover occurs and to correct any discrepancies in your plan.