Even if you’ve moved all your applications and data into the cloud, you still need a disaster recovery strategy. The cloud vendor can have an outage; you can experience a network problem that interrupts access; or you can have lost or corrupted data that prevents an application from running properly.

Microsoft Azure provides tools to help you recover from failures whatever their root cause.

Application Failure

Some application failures can be handled automatically. Traffic Manager will automatically route requests to available servers, avoiding any that are experiencing unplanned downtime.

If there’s a problem with a corrupted Azure Virtual Machine, you’ll need to restore from a VM backup.

If an application fails because services it depends on aren’t available, you may need to bring the application online in a region where the services are running.

Network Failure

When network failures prevent you from accessing applications and data, you’ll need to shift your cloud resources to a region that your network can reach.

Data Failure

If the entire database is unavailable, you can bring up your database on a different server. Auto-failover groups leverage replication to recover the database in a secondary location.

If your problem results from corrupt or missing data, you’ll need to restore data from a clean backup. It’s important to develop a cloud backup strategy so you have easy access to the data you need.

You might notice one common thread in how you respond to cloud outages: switching to another location you’re able to access. In this respect, disaster recovery solution in the cloud isn’t very different from disaster recovery in the data center: you need another environment where you’re able to bring up services. For many businesses, the easiest solution is a secondary environment in a different cloud region. Some businesses may choose to take a multi-cloud approach and implement cloud environments with multiple cloud vendors to minimize the impact of an outage.

Another similarity is that, cloud or not, you’ll still want to write a disaster recovery plan. You need to know where all your resources are located, their criticality, how fast you need to get them back online, and how much data they can afford to lose.  You’ll also want to periodically test your recovery process. Even if much of it is automated, executing it will ensure you haven’t missed any steps and let you know if you can achieve your recovery targets.

Get help developing your cloud disaster recovery solution with disaster recovery services from Prescient Solutions. Our IT consulting services and IT managed services enable Chicago and Schaumburg area businesses to solve their toughest IT challenges. Contact us to learn more about making sure your cloud is disaster proof.