It is unpredictable when a disaster will strike an organization’s cloud infrastructure. However, a team can create a cloud disaster recovery plan that will restore operations according to their requirements. The following will provide an overview regarding cloud disaster recovery, benefits, key metrics, and strategies.

A basic definition for an IT disaster is an unanticipated occurrence that results in a disruption of an organization’s computing and data storage processes. There could be many causes. For example, a cloud provider’s hardware can become faulty or completely fail. An accidental deletion of data by an employee can also lead to a disaster event.

The traditional method for implementing a disaster recovery (DR) plan utilizes on-premise equipment to back up applications, data, and workloads. However, cloud backup and disaster recovery provides much greater flexibility and speed.

Typically, a public cloud provider such as AWS (Amazon Web Services), Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure will be used. Using a cloud provider is an off-premises DR because the backup will be performed at a remote site then restored back to the original data location. Below will list several chief benefits for using the cloud for backup and disaster recovery.

Cloud backup and DR enables geographic redundancy, which allows the distribution of IT resources over several regions to maximize accessibility, availability, and utility.

Payments for the services of public cloud providers can be structured as pay as you go, with charges only for whatever IT resources that were used. Such an arrangement minimizes capital expenditures, allowing small startups to build businesses more easily.

Disaster recovery can be performed rapidly because the public cloud infrastructure from the major providers provides ease of access, high bandwidth, and fast disk I/O.

Utilizing the cloud enables ease of scalability. Businesses can readily increase or decrease the use of cloud IT resources and infrastructure capacity as determined by their current requirements or economic conditions.

Part 2 will discuss Two Key Metrics and Four Cloud Disaster Recovery Strategies.

Choosing an expert computer technology-support provider is an important decision for your business. Alpha Engineering Associates has been a trusted partner of many companies in the Washington, Baltimore and Annapolis areas since 1990. For affordable client-focused network consulting services and solutions, please call Alpha Engineering Associates today at (410) 295-9500.