Disaster Recovery in the era of Cloud
I worked in the Disaster Recovery practice of a Big 4 consultancy and spent a couple of years managing the DR operations for a Fortune 200 Pharma. In those environments, I had the luxury of millions of dollars dedicated to mitigating the risks associated with technology's role in business continuity. In one instance, the design had a 1-to-1 mapping of resources from production to DR. 50% of the infrastructure cost revolved around DR mitigation.
Not every organization has the luxury or the operational resources to dedicate to DR. However, DR remains one of the core risks of ongoing operations. The growth in Public Cloud has brought Fortune 1000-like data replication and compute capacity with similar recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives to organizations without the multi-million dollar DR budget.
Data Protection
Data protection is an entry point to leveraging public cloud for DR. Every modern data protection platform enables cloud backup. However, not every tool is equal. Data transfer cost is a critical part of optimizing for cost and data availability for cloud-based backup. The fastest data transfer is the transfer that doesn't have to occur. Modern tools leverage real-time data deduplication. Data deduplication ensures only net new data is replicated to the cloud service.
Cloud-based backup is useless without the ability to recover the data. Mature platforms enable the capability to restore workloads to public cloud environments. Since public cloud resources are billed on a pay for use model, the overall operational cost of public cloud-based DR is reduced.
DR Testing
While public cloud allows for easy data replication, the need for DR testing isn't eased. DR testing is one of the most difficult aspects of operations. However, the public cloud allows for spinning up and down as much and as little of your environment needed to provide a test. Production is in a constant state of change. A well designed DR test script allows for the frequent testing of the DR plan with little to no risk to production.
Learn more
The CTO Advisor is hosting a free webinar on April 20th, to extend the conversation about DR in the Cloud. Register for the more learnings in leveraging public cloud.
Solutions Engineer || Synth & Audio Nerd 🤓 / Philosophy Grad / "Pastor's Wife" / 1x Husky Dad / 4x Cat Dad
6yHehe, I always love asking people their DR plan, so I can learn what their Backup/Recovery plan is. Then I ask them what their DR plan is again... "for real". ;D I'm curious - what's your take on out-of-band communications as a part of DR? Obviously a selfish question, but I can't think of a better person to ask. :)
IT Support Engineer at Amazon
6yWill you provide some vendor names that we can consult to talk about scope, deliverable, and cost?
Azure Sales Director, US Financial Services
6yGreat topic, I just presented this to a good size group of Wealth Management organizations and many I believed learned a good amount, starting with what "Cloud" is and is not. BTW, DR is easy until you actually have to use it.