Planning an Efficient Cloud Disaster Recovery Strategy

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.

Your business data is under constant threat of attack or data loss. Imagine you are working on a really big project when all of a sudden your computer crashes. All of your hard work is lost. This is a major problem, especially when there are deadlines to meet.

Unfortunately, many businesses don’t take this seriously.

Malicious code, hackers, natural disasters, and even your employees can wipe out an entire server filled with critical files without anyone noticing until it is too late.

Are you willing to fully accept all these risks?

96% of all business workstations aren’t being backed (Contingency Planning and Strategic Research Corporation). That’s a large amount of potential work being lost forever. Businesses are slowly starting to see the importance of having backup systems. This includes using cloud storage services.

A large majority of IT professionals have ranked backup and disaster recovery solutions as a top priority. Having a disaster recovery plan is essential for many reasons.

For one, it keeps your business data secure. And two, it ensures continuity of your company.

Traditionally, businesses only looked at on-site issues, like server failures, power outages and data loss in their plans. This is extremely outdated for disaster recovery planning. It’s very important to have a strategy that includes situations where you are unable to connect to the web.

Then on top of that, no one really tests the backup plans they have created. That’s a disaster waiting to happen.

In order to have a fail-proof plan, you have to first assess all of your weak points. Where can mishaps occur? Only then can you determine the best way to handle the issue when it arises.

Always plan ahead – businesses that fail to do this will only struggle to handle problems as they happen. If you don’t have a way to continue your business when your business is without internet for hours or even days, then you are skating on thin ice.

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

Thanks to its high flexibility, the cloud technology enables efficient disaster recovery, regardless of the type or intensity of workloads. The data is stored in a secured cloud environment architected to provide high availability. The service is available on-demand, which enables organizations of different sizes to tailor DR solutions to their needs.

As opposed to traditional solutions, cloud-based disaster recovery is easy to set up and manage. Businesses no longer need to waste hours on transferring backup data from their in-house servers or tape drives to recover after a disaster. The cloud automates these processes, ensuring fast and error-free data recovery.

As companies continue to add new hardware and software applications and services to their daily processes, related security risks increase.  Disasters can occur at any moment and leave a business devastated by massive data loss. When you consider how much they can cost, it is clear why it makes sense to create a data backup and recovery plan.

Any amount of downtime can cost a business tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands in man-hour labor spent to recover or redo the work lost.  In some cases, an 8-hour downtime window can cost a small company up to $20k and large enterprises in the tens of thousands.

Considering the figures, it is clear why every second of service or system interruption counts and what is the actual value of having a disaster recovery plan in place.

Cloud recovery helps businesses bounce back from natural disasters, cyber-attacks, ransomware, and other threats that can render all files useless in an instant.  Just by minimizing the time needed to take workloads back online, it directly lowers the cost of a system failure.

Although most companies and their IT departments are aware of the risk, few make an effort to implement disaster recovery until it is too late. Now, let us take a more in-depth look at how it can translate into business benefits.

Small and medium businesses are coming around to see how cloud services can be leveraged for disaster recovery. What makes it attractive is its low cost. If you don’t have the resources to maintain your own IT task force or data center, then this is a great alternative.

One of the most significant advantages of cloud-based options over standard disaster recovery management is their cost-efficiency.  Traditional backup involves setting up physical servers at a remote location, which can be costly. The cloud, on the other hand, enables you to outsource as many hardware and software resources as you need while paying only for what you use.

When considering the cost of disaster recovery, it is essential to think beyond the actual price of the solution.

Just think about how much it would cost not to have it.  Small companies can choose a service plan that fits their budget.  The implementation of data management does not require any additional maintenance costs or hiring IT teams. Your provider handles all the technical activities, so you do not have to worry about them.

Another benefit of cloud-based technology is its reliability.  Service providers have data banks to provide redundancy, which ensures maximum availability of your data.  This also makes it possible for your backups to be restored faster than what would be the case with traditional DR.

The workload migration and failover in cloud-based environments can take only several minutes. With traditional recovery solutions, this time frame is usually longer since the failover involves physical servers set up in a remote location. Depending on the amount of data you need to back up, you can also choose to migrate data in phases.

Cloud backup services offer a high degree of scalability. Compared to physical systems, cloud backup is virtually endless.  As organizations grow, their systems can grow with them. All you need to do is extend your service plan with your provider and get additional resources as the need arises.

For organizations considering cloud disaster recovery for the first time and are wondering where to start, here’s an easy cloud disaster recovery plan that will help you plan an effective disaster recovery strategy:

1. Understand Your Infrastructure & Outline Any Risks

It is essential to consider your IT infrastructure, including the assets, equipment, and the data you possess.

It’s also important to assess where all this is stored and how much it is all worth. Once you have got this aspect sorted, you now need to evaluate the risks that might affect all this. Risks can include natural disasters, data theft and power outages, among others.

Now that you have an account of all your assets, their quantities and possible disaster threats to them, you are in a better position to design your DR plan to eliminate/minimize these risks.

2. Conduct a Business Impact Analysis for Cloud Disaster Recovery

A business impact analysis is next on the list. This will give you an understanding of the limitations of your business operations once disaster strikes.

Following two parameters help you assess this factor:

1. 1. a) Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
   2. b) Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

RTO is the maximum time that your application can stay offline before beginning to affect your business operations.

Scenario 1: If your company is dedicated to fast-paced service delivery, then an application failure can cost you heavy losses.

Moreover, you will have to invest heavily in a DR plan to resume business operations in a matter of minutes.

Scenario 2: If you have a medium-paced business and disaster affects your operations, you can still find alternative ways to carry out business operations.

Therefore, you can set your RTO for as long as one week. In such a case, you will not have to invest many resources into disaster recovery saving, thus saving ample time to acquire sufficient backup assets after the disaster strikes.

Knowing your RTO is very important as it equivalent to the number of resources you have to invest in your DR plan, as the time lost in the RTO can be used to gather backup resources.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

RPO is the maximum amount of time for which you can bear data loss from your application due to a major crisis.

Points to consider for determining RPO:

• Possible data loss when disaster strikes
• Possible time loss before the data compromise

If you apply the scenario mentioned above, your RPO can be as little as five minutes, as your business is critical and cannot afford more than the specified amount of time-lapse.

Whereas for Scenario 2, you may want to back-up your data but since the data isn’t time-sensitive, you will not have to invest heavily in DR.

3. Creating a Cloud Disaster Recovery plan based on your RPO and RTO

Now that you have determined your RPO and RTO, you can now focus on designing a system to meet your DR goals.

You can choose from the below range of DR approaches to implement your DR plan:

• Backup and Restore
• Pilot Light Approach
• Warm Standby
• Full replication in the Cloud
• Multi-Cloud Option

You can use a combination of these approaches to your benefit or exclusively as per your business requirement.

4. Approach the right cloud partner

After you have considered your approach, the next steps should be to look for a trusted cloud service provider that will help in the deployment.

If you plan to use the full replication in the Cloud, then you would like to consider the following factors to assess an ideal cloud provider:

• Reliability
• Speed of Recovery
• Usability
• Simplicity in Setup and Recovery
• Scalability
• Security Compliance

All the big cloud service providers including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM have disaster recovery options.

5. Build Your Cloud Disaster Recovery (Cloud DR) Infrastructure

After consulting a cloud DR partner, you can work with the provider to implement your design and setup your DR infrastructure.

Based on the DR approach you select, there are several logistical aspects to consider:

• What is the quantity of infrastructure components you will require?
• By what means will you copy the data to the cloud?
• What are the best ways to approach user authentication and access management?
• What security and compliance best practices will you need to setup?
• What security measures will you put in place to minimize the likelihood of disasters?

Remember, it is crucial to ensure your DR strategy is aligned with your RTO and RPO specifications for smooth business operations.

6. Put Your Cloud Disaster Recovery Plan on Paper

It is important to have a standard guideline or process flowchart with specific instructions for each and everyone involved in DR. When a disaster occurs, each individual should be ready to take charge of the responsibility as per his role in the DR process.

Moreover, every instruction should be clearly stated on paper, with the finest details mentioned.

These steps ensure the effectiveness of the DR plan.

7. Test Your DR Plan Often

Since your DR plan is on paper, the next step would involve testing your DR plan and more often. This helps to ensure that there are no loopholes.

On paper, the plan may look like the most comprehensive one, but you will know its credibility only after testing.

Your first test may not go as likely as you thought it would be, it may be worse. But then you will learn from these experiences and will upgrade your DR plan to better brace up your infrastructure against potential disasters.

The bigger your DR plan, the more important it becomes to test it. Coming to the frequency of your tests, it is recommended that you run your DR tests every quarter.

Meanwhile, you can monitor and analyze your backup infrastructure performance on a daily or weekly basis.

Your organization will always be a witness to change in terms of people, processes and technologies. It is good to test your DR plan throughout these changes to ensure that business is ever-ready for an emergency.

Think! Is Your Organization’s Data Well Protected?

At Al Reyami Technologies, we strive to provide our Customers with the best that technology can offer to streamline and safeguard your data thereby ensuring business continuity.

You can also visit our blog to learn more about “Why Disaster Recovery and High Availability are Critical to Business Continuity”

Get in touch with us today to understand the various DR approaches and identify the one that suits your business requirement!

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