How to Design a Cloudy-Ready

Disaster Recovery

Infrastructure

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How to Design a Cloudy-Ready Disaster Recovery Infrastructure

Regardless of the emergencies that might come up every now and then, it is

paramount for business processes to stay afloat for the good of the business. All

kinds of things happen not only on cloud but even in the private circles and it is

vital to stay prepared.

For the sake of your continuous business operations, it is crucial to build a

surrounding that is able to support this. A pivotal part of this includes

understanding that there is a probability of the cloud having down time or going

down. To understand how detrimental this can be, take the example of Microsoft

Azure where an SSL certificate expired taking down massive important public

components of the cloud down with it. In the past, not many companies found it

palatable to enroll in Disaster Recovery or even discuss matters pertaining to

business continuity.

However, it is crucial to understand that these two; Business Continuity and

Disaster Recovery are very different business objectives. However, they are

reliant on each other and hence overlap. To date the ability of the cloud is not

fully understood. However, it is not really about the functioning of the cloud but

about the capabilities of Disaster Recovery.

Looking at the cloud as a Disaster Recovery or a business opportunity is

something that every enterprise large or small is going to have to do at some

point. Most organizations have already made the intelligent decision to move

into the cloud. Some companies offer a recovery solution that seeks to protect

organizations from loss of data, reputation and even revenue should an adverse

situation occur. This is by helping them recover their IT resources in an efficient

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and effective manner. The point is to combine the benefits that a multi-tenant

cloud platform has to offer in conjunction with the most recent recovery

technology resulting into a testable, very reliable organization grade system of

recovery.

There are a number of cloud technologies that have become key pillars in

improving the IT redundancy business. It is vital to get a glimpse of these before

we cover the execution aspect of a DRBC (Data Recovery and Business

Continuity) strategy.

Some of these include:

Cloud-based Traffic Management

The ability to control over great distances using Global Server Load Balancing

(GSLB) and Global Traffic Management (GTM) has positioned the cloud to

becoming a real hub that can be used for different Disaster Recovery strategies.

Everything is Software-defined

With the increasing ability of using modern day networking controllers, using one

physical switch port to create thousands of virtual connection points, controlling

layer 4-7 traffic at better granular levels has led to more powerful and resilient

cloud models that offer better storage computing and security.

Automation and Virtualization

Virtualization has allowed for back up of vast kinds of workloads and images,

sharing and replication. Depending on what the organization needs, the images

can then be span to global data centers. This mated with automation then

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makes seamless work of spanning the platforms to different infrastructures with

better resource control.

New hardware and storage intelligence types

Even though cloud storage has come a long way, the ability to control storage

regardless of whether it is on the more advanced open-source or the more

traditional EMC platform has become more advanced. Some aspects like quick

site to site replication and controller multi-tenancy make the cloud a pivotal

piece of the Disaster Recovery process. The logical layer that the storage offers

is equally powerful and the storage that is software designed allows other

infrastructures like Virtual Machines (VMs) to scale dynamically.

With that said, here are some of the ways that DRBC can be applied in modern

organizations.

First, it is imperative for every organization to conduct Business Impact Analysis

(BIA) to identify effective recovery time objectives and an appropriate internal

Disaster Recovery strategy.

There are a variety of cloud model options that administrators can look into that

include:

Active or hot site configurations

In this case there is minimal downtime that occurs in the occurrence of an

emergency. You will need a hot site that is constantly operational which is still a

necessity but this can be a very pricey package.

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Cold or warm site Active/Passive

Some downtime though not prolonged should be expected. However, this will

largely depend on the BIA. This is more applicable to the public dynamic cloud

model and is less expensive.

DRBC that is work-load based

In this case not the whole infrastructure requires to be recovered, only a certain

criteria of services, databases and applications. Even though the databases,

applications and other services are still stored in the cloud, in the event that an

emergency occurs, they can be provided or mirrored live.

Recovery that is back-up based

Even though the downtime might not be a primary factor in this case, the

workload or the application in question needs to be brought up quite fast.

These also work on the basis of replicating data, services and other applications

to a back-up that is VM-based. The process is a bit slower depending on the

contract and whether you are looking to have the entire workload or just specific

parts.

Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS or RaaS)

The best thing about this is the flexibility that it offers. You don’t have to worry

about downtime in this environment. You can also specify the recovery of

certain workloads or applications in case there is an emergency.

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Creating a dynamic solution is not much of a challenge since there is already

integration into virtual systems that are underlying. Furthermore, instead of

charging you for the resource that you use, you get to pay for what you recover.

Keep in mind that there are a variety of services that are being offered by the

different cloud providers and vendors. This is even better since the services are

being offered to larger organizations of varying sizes. The cloud can be the best

platform for your Disaster Recovery given its better replications, resilience and

diverse avenues of support.

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