A cloud-based managed service, cloud disaster recovery (CDR) assists businesses in recovering their critical systems after a natural or manmade disaster by providing remote access in a secure virtual environment.

Traditional disaster recovery involves the management of a secondary data center, which can be expensive and time-consuming. In contrast, CDR has eliminated the need for traditional infrastructure and decreased costly downtime significantly. In addition, CDR enables IT personnel to immediately perform spin-up and failover procedures immediately after an incident.

Basics of CDR

Cloud disaster recovery utilizes a drastically different approach in comparison to traditional disaster recovery methods. In contrast to traditional DR, CDR does not load servers with the operation system (OS) and application programs, patching to the most recent configuration. Instead, CDR virtually replicates the whole server, which includes its OS, applications, data, and patches, and then creates a virtual server.

This virtual server is backed up to an off-premises data center, and it can be spun up on a virtual host within minutes. As this virtual server does not rely on hardware, a company’s IT team can migrate its operating system, applications, data, and patches to another data center much more quickly than a traditional disaster recovery approach.

Traditional Disaster Recovery Requirements

The investment in time and resources that a traditional DR approach requires gradually spiral upward. Below are the requirements of implementing a traditional data recovery plan:

• Physical facilities for housing IT infrastructure
• Setup, management, support, and security of facility requires labor costs
• Capacity of physical data storage needs to scale with business requirement
• Must ensure adequate bandwidth for internet connectivity to run applications
• Network infrastructure needs firewalls, load balancers, routers, and switches

Cloud Disaster Recover Benefits

Fortunately, cloud computing has enabled IT personnel to implement a disaster plan with much greater speed and efficiency. The following lists the benefits of CDR.

• Savings in time and capital expenditure
• Additional data backup location options
• Ease in implementation
• High reliability
• Greater scalability

Part 2 will discuss Cloud Disaster Recovery (CDR) Planning Steps 1 to 3.

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