Cloud Disaster Recovery

Disasters in Cloud
• A disaster is any type of unexpected event that
disrupts our business’s IT workloads
• A disaster could be caused by
1. Failure of a cloud provider’s hardware
2. A cyber attack that makes applications
unavailable
3. Accidental deletion of data by one of your
admins.
 Disasters in Cloud Cont..
• Data is the most valuable asset of modern-day
organizations. Its loss can result in irreversible
damage to your business, including the loss of
productivity, revenue, reputation, and even
customers.
• It is hard to predict when a disaster will occur and
how serious its impact will be.
• However, what you can control is the way you
respond to a disaster and how successfully your
organization will recover from it. 
 Disaster Recovery In Cloud Computing: All You
Need To Know
How does disaster recovery in cloud computing differ from
traditional disaster recovery? 
• Traditional disaster recovery involves building a remote
disaster recovery (DR) site, which requires constant
maintenance and support. In this case, data protection
and disaster recovery are performed manually, which can
be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process.
• Disaster recovery in cloud computing requires storing
critical data and applications in cloud storage and failing
over to a secondary site in case of a disaster. Backup and
disaster recovery in cloud computing can be automated,
requiring minimum input .
 Disaster Recovery In Cloud Computing: All You
Need To Know
How does disaster recovery planning work in cloud
computing? –
1. Creating, testing, and updating a DR plan can prepare your
organization for an unexpected disaster and ensure safety
and continuity for your business.
2. A comprehensive DR plan should consider your
infrastructure, potential threats and vulnerabilities, most
critical assets and the order of their recovery, and workable
DR strategies.
3. Integration of cloud computing services in disaster recovery
allows you to design a DR plan and automate each step of
the recovery process.
A traditional on-premises DR site generally includes
the following:
1. A dedicated facility for housing the IT infrastructure
2. Sufficient server capacity to ensure a high level of
operational performance
3. Internet connectivity with sufficient bandwidth
4. Network infrastructure, including firewalls, routers,
and switches, to ensure a reliable connection between
the primary and secondary data centers
Traditional disaster recovery can often be too
complex to manage and monitor.
• Cloud disaster recovery is a cloud computing
service which allows for storing and
recovering system data on a remote cloud-
based platform.
Disaster recovery in cloud computing can effectively deal with most issues of
traditional disaster recovery.
The benefits include the following:
• You don’t need to build a secondary physical site, and buy additional hardware and
software to support critical operations. With disaster recovery in cloud computing,
you get access to cloud storage, which can be used as a secondary DR site.
• Depending on your current business demands, you can easily scale up or down by
adding required cloud computing resources.
• With its affordable pay-as-you go pricing model, you are required to pay only for
the cloud computing services you actually use.
• Disaster recovery in cloud computing can be performed in a matter of minutes
from anywhere. The only thing you need is a device that is connected to the
internet.
• You can store your backed up data across multiple geographical locations, thus
eliminating a single point of failure. You can always have a backup copy, even if one
of the cloud data centers fails.
• State-of-the-art network infrastructure ensures that any issues or errors can be
quickly identified and taken care of by a cloud provider. Moreover, the cloud
provider ensures 24/7 support and maintenance of your cloud storage, including
hardware and software upgrades.
 Why Choose Disaster Recovery in Cloud
Computing
• The primary goal of disaster recovery is to
minimize the overall impact of a disaster on
business performance. Disaster recovery in
cloud computing can do just that
• Due to its cost-efficiency, scalability, and
reliability, disaster recovery in cloud computing
has become the most profitable option for
small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
 How to Design a Cloud-Based Disaster
Recovery Plan
An effective cloud-based DR plan should include
the following steps:
1. Perform a risk assessment and business
impact analysis.
2. Choose prevention, preparedness, response,
and recovery measures.
3. Test and update your cloud-based DR plan.
Perform a risk assessment and business impact analysis
• The first step is to assess your current IT infrastructure, as
well as identify potential threats and risk factors that your
organization is most exposed to.
• A risk assessment helps you discover vulnerabilities of your
IT infrastructure and identify which business functions and
components are most critical. At the same time, a business
impact analysis allows you to estimate how unexpected
service disruption might affect your business.
• Based on these estimations, you can also calculate the
financial and non-financial costs associated with a DR
event, particularly Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and
Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
Perform a risk assessment and business impact analysis
• The RTO is the maximum amount of time that IT
infrastructure can be down before any serious
damage is done to your business.
• The RPO is the maximum amount of data which
can be lost as a result of service disruption.
• Understanding the RTO and RPO can help you
decide which data and applications to protect,
how many resources to invest in achieving DR
objectives, and which DR strategies to implement
in your cloud-based DR plan.
 Implement prevention, preparedness, response, and
recovery measures
• The next step is to decide which prevention, preparedness, response, and
recovery (PPRR) measures should be implemented in disaster recovery of
the cloud computing environment.
PPRR measures can accomplish the following:
• Prevention allows you to reduce possible threats and eliminate system
vulnerabilities in order to prevent a disaster from occurring in the first
place.
• Preparedness requires creating the outline of a DR plan which states what
to do during an actual DR event. Remember to document every step of the
process to ensure that the DR plan is properly executed during a disaster.
• Response describes which DR strategies should be implemented when a
disaster strikes in order to address an incident and mitigate its impact.
• Recovery determines what should be done to successfully recover your
infrastructure in case of a disaster and how to minimize the damage.
 RTO and RPO
• RTO, or Recovery Time Objective, is the target time you
set for the recovery of your IT and business activities
after a disaster has struck.
• If, for example, you find that your RTO is five hours,
meaning your business can survive with systems down
for this amount of time, then you will need to ensure a
high level of preparation and a higher budget to ensure
that systems can be recovered quickly. On the other
hand, if the RTO is two weeks, then you can probably
budget less and invest in less advanced solutions.
RPO: Recovery Point Objective
• Recovery point objectives refer to your company’s
loss tolerance: the amount of data that can be lost
before significant harm to the business occurs. The
objective is expressed as a time measurement from
the loss event to the most recent preceding backup.
• After you have determined which approach to disaster recovery to
implement, you should choose a data protection solution capable of
putting your DR plan into action and achieving DR objectives. Choose
the solution which meets your business needs and complies with
your infrastructure requirements.
For this purpose, consider the following criteria:
• Available services
• Hardware capacity
• Bandwidth
• Data security
• Ease of use
• Service scalability
• Cost
• Reputation
Test and update your cloud-based DR plan
• After you have created and documented the DR plan,
you should run regular tests to see if your plan actually
works. You can test whether business-critical data and
applications can be recovered within the expected
time frame.
• Testing a cloud-based DR plan can help you identify
any issues and inconsistencies in your current
approach to disaster recovery in cloud computing.
• After the test run, you can decide what your DR plan
lacks and how it should be updated in order to achieve
the required results and eliminate existing issues.
• There are multiple ways to implement a disaster recovery plan.
One approach is to rely on on-premise infrastructure for backing up
your workloads.
• The method that provides you with the greatest flexibility and
recovery speed, however, is a cloud backup and disaster recovery.
A cloud disaster recovery plan is one that makes use of a public
cloud -- such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud Platform -- to back up
data, applications and other resources. Then, when disaster occurs,
those resources can be restored from the cloud back to their
original locations -- whether those locations are on-premise
infrastructure or the cloud.
• Another way to describe cloud backup and disaster recovery is to
call it offsite disaster recovery because your workloads are backed
up to a remote site and can be recovered from there.
 Cloud Disaster Recovery Approaches
There are four approaches to consider:
• Backup and recovery. It involves backing up data to the cloud and
recovering it from the cloud when a disaster occurs. For a simple backup
and recovery strategy to work, you need to ensure that it meets your 
RTO and RPO requirements. In cases where RPO and RTO needs are very
high, a backup and recovery approach to offsite disaster recovery may be
difficult to achieve.
• Pilot light. Under this approach, you keep a copy of your production virtual
servers and databases stored in the cloud at all times. You keep their data
and configurations synced with those of the production systems, but the
cloud-based backup resources are spun up and activated only in the event
that your production systems fail due to a disaster. Thus, the cloud backup
environment functions like a pilot light in your furnace. It is always ready to
fire up on demand; however, because it will take some time to spin up the
cloud-based backup resources, recovery following a disaster is not
instantaneous. The trade-off for the delay is that you don’t need to pay to
have your backup resources running in the cloud constantly.
 Cloud Disaster Recovery Approaches
• Warm standby. Warm standby is similar to the pilot light approach,
except that your backup virtual servers and databases are actually
running at all times. This enables you to put the backup resources
into production almost instantaneously whenever a disaster strikes.
However, this approach will be more expensive, because you have to
pay to keep backup copies of your infrastructure running in the cloud
at all times.
• Multi-site. This approach entails using the warm standby technique,
but instead of having only one copy of your workloads running in the
cloud at all times, you run multiple copies that are spread across
different geographic zones of the cloud. This strategy provides the
greatest level of availability because it ensures that you can restore
your workloads very quickly even if part of your cloud provider’s
infrastructure has failed. It is also, however, the most expensive
approach.
• The specific approach that you take when designing
a cloud disaster recovery architecture will depend
on your needs as well as your budget.
• If your databases and infrastructure configurations
are relatively constant and your RTO demands are
not too great, a simple cloud backup and recovery
strategy might work. A more costly strategy might
be required if you need more availability or the
ability to recover more quickly.