Disaster Recovery in India
Disaster Recovery (DR) is all about planning and putting those plans in action in case of a disaster in your Data Center. You can never predict when a disaster might strike, but you should always have a contingency plan and recovery solution to save your business in critical scenarios.
Prioritizing your systems and applications is crucial before you determine the important assets of your business during downtime which would take some seconds or minutes to get up and running. You need to take into account the technical dependencies of critical applications and how long will they take to get back online. You need to architect your applications in such a way that they run smoothly on the cloud platform through built-in DR mechanism.
Basically, Disaster Recovery on Cloud is a service which allows backup and recovery of remote machines on a cloud platform. IT heads who have witnessed disruptions in businesses aim for data recovery alternatives. IT resources should be protected and there should be duplication of data before disaster strikes and you lose all your mission critical data. While researching for Disaster Recovery solution, it is important to clearly understand backup and data restoration aspects.
Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) relatively make it easy for the customers to retain their data after it has been backed up on a cloud which is simply easy. The only challenge in Disaster Recovery is the recovery of data. Bandwidth plays an important role because there are terabytes of data and with defined Recovery Time Objective (RTO) it becomes critical to recover all the data within the allocated time frame.
CSPs are stepping up against such scenarios where they have started providing Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solutions which ensure business continuity. Due to virtualization with cloud, the complete server including the operating system, applications, patches and data is confined in the virtual server, and this server can be backed up on an offsite data center.
Organizations have started cloning them on premise system on cloud and have established a secure connection between these two environments. This creates redundancy when the on premise data center goes offline and all the applications on cloud are up and running without any interruptions in business activity.
Here are some of the many benefits of Disaster Recovery on Cloud:
Hassle Free– Disaster Recovery Solutions doesn’t require additional hardware and thus you do not need to incur any expenses to your existing infrastructure, so there is nothing additional to manage, update or upgrade.
On-demand Abilities– If a situation occurs where you are facing downtime of your primary site, DRaaS offers switch-over where you can operate your infrastructure directly in the cloud by avoiding downtime as you recover from a disastrous situation. Your valuable customers are not affected by the disaster as you quickly retain your business’ flow and minimize risk and losses.
Pocket Friendly– DRaaS solutions are cost effective as compared to physical DR solutions. You can control costs around your Disaster Recovery with advanced cloud based solutions to structure your Disaster Recovery investment to align with usage, so you basically only pay for what you need.
Safe and Secure – Many cloud-based DR solutions use advanced security layers to ensure that your data is secure. Complete data is replicated in the cloud which is fully encrypted and only you can access it when needed. You can recover your data at any point of time through secure protection during data transmission. With new DR solutions, you totally eliminate the high risk and cost of downtime.
Types of Disaster Recovery sites on Cloud
Hot Site– A Commercial Disaster Recovery service which allows a business to run smoothly in an event of disaster, a hot site contains all the equipment needed by an organization in case their primary site becomes inoperable.
Cold Site– A cold site is a DR service which provides space for equipment and infrastructure that the customer needs to provide. Some personnel are required to setup and for the upkeep of the site. Between the three DR site options, cold site is the one which takes the longest to get up and running in an emergency.
Warm Site– Warm site is somewhere between Cold Site and Hot Site. This site contains pre-configured equipment which is quick and easy to start operations. This site takes average recovery time in comparison to the other two sites.
Conclusion
Replication of business critical data is important so that no one suffers when a disaster occurs. As discussed before, planning is the first step towards securing your business and choosing a proper Disaster Recovery Solution on cloud. During a disaster in case your primary site fails to work, you should have all your data duplicated on the secondary site which is on cloud.