Disaster recovery plans today need to take into account the impact of the cloud in two ways. First, how can using the cloud help you achieve disaster recovery for your data center? Second, how do you provide disaster recovery for applications and data you have in the cloud?

Disaster Recovery Using the Cloud

You can use the cloud to provide offsite backup or use the cloud to provide a full disaster recovery capability. Data can be backed up in the cloud to be downloaded to your secondary site when needed, or virtual machines (VMs) can be backed up to the cloud to be brought rapidly online when your primary site becomes unavailable. Tiered storage and low charges for inactive VMs make this a cost-effective solution, particularly when using backup tools that offer deduplication to minimize the data.

Key considerations when using disaster recovery for the cloud include:

• securing data while in transit to and from the cloud
• selecting a cloud provider that meets industry compliance standards
• providing necessary bandwidth for transferring data to the cloud
• integrating user identity and access management with cloud
• ease of recovery and ability to test the process

Disaster Recovery for Your Cloud

Using the cloud to run applications or store data doesn’t eliminate the need for your own disaster recovery process. While cloud offers a high level of availability, even major cloud providers have experienced outages. You can also lose access to your cloud services when there’s a major network outage.

There are several ways to address these concerns, mostly through leveraging different kinds of redundancy. You’ll get some protection by deploying instances in multiple regions supported by your cloud provider; some enterprises choose to keep environments with multiple cloud providers to further reduce the risk. It’s beneficial to keep a local copy of critical data. Depending on your needs and the applications you run in the cloud, you may want to train users in your old, manual processes to make sure work doesn’t come to a complete halt even if you lose access to the cloud.

As you can see, using cloud can simultaneously simplify disaster recovery in some ways while making it more complex in others. Work with Prescient Solutions to design, implement, and support an effective disaster recovery strategy that ensures your applications and data are safe whether you run in the cloud or run locally. We bring 20 years of experience to supporting information technology in Chicago and Schaumburg. Contact us to learn more about IT solutions that solve all your IT challenges.