Planning for Disaster Recovery in the Cloud – Part 1
August 14, 2019Ransomware and Trojan Attacks Rise Q1 2019
August 22, 2019As discussed in Part 1, the chief benefits from cloud backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) are Geo-Redundancy, Pay as You Go, Rapid Recovery, and Scalability. Part 2 will discuss Two Key Metrics and Four Cloud Disaster Recovery Strategies.
Two Key Metrics
1) Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – The maximum period of time that your system should be offline after a disaster.
2) Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – The maximum amount of data your company can afford to lose because of a disaster.
Backup & Recovery
Basically, this involves using the cloud for both backing up data and performing recovery after a disaster event. Although the strategy is quite straightforward, the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) requirements of the organization must be met in order to make it viable as in other strategies.
Pilot Light
A virtual duplicate of production servers and databases will be constantly stored in the cloud with this strategy. It is only activated when production systems experience failure. Like a pilot light, it is ready to be ignited when needed. The DR is not immediate, but this is compensated for by not paying for the expense of constantly running backup resources in the cloud.
Warm Standby
Comparable to the pilot light strategy, warm standby differs by having backup virtual servers and databases constantly running. It will cost more, but both RTO and RPO performance will be superior. This strategy allows for backup resources to be put into production almost immediately when there is a disaster.
Multi-Site
This approach utilizes warm standby, but rather than creating only one copy of workloads, several copies are distributed among various geographic regions. Providing the highest level of availability, this strategy ensures the restoration of workloads can be performed rapidly even when a portion of the infrastructure of a cloud provider suffers failure. It is the most costly strategy.
Alpha Engineering Business Support
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 and offer:
• 24/7 Managed Services for Business Computing Systems
• Network and Mobile Computing Support
• Disaster Recovery Planning
• Software Development
For affordable client-focused network consulting services and solutions, please call Alpha Engineering Associates today at (410) 295-9500.
