In today’s business environment, disasters are becoming quite a common occurrence. With the word disaster, perhaps the first thing that pops up in your mind is an earthquake or flood like situation.
Although such events also do qualify broadly as disasters, the term Disaster Recovery (DR) has assumed a whole new meaning in today’s data driven world. In the present scenario, data and core business operations are your most valuable asset.
What is Disaster Recovery (DR)?
Disaster Recovery or DR can be classified as the set of all activities and steps that you plan, implement and monitor at the enterprise level that will keep your business operations up and running or out of harm’s way in case something terrible happens.
The Traditional Approach to DR and its Caveats
When we talk of a traditional approach towards DR, it encompasses setting up a dedicated physical site where all your critical enterprise data will be replicated and available for recovery if something bad happens.
The biggest downside of this traditional approach to DR is that its an in-efficient and resource intensive option. Secondly, DR is a never ending process and your threat vectors are likely to vary over time.
So, a traditional approach to DR proves both resource intensive and in-efficient. Your alternate DR site is a fully operational setup that needs heavy investment and constant expenses are required to support that arrangement.
On top of that, you will also need to up-grade your traditional DR site as your needs change, or the technology you have employed becomes obsolete. Crux of the matter is, this traditional approach to DR is just no more feasible in the long run.
Cloud Powered Disaster Recovery (DR)
Now that we have highlighted the downsides of conventional DR practices, lets discuss what makes the Cloud a perfect ecosystem for Disaster Recovery (DR). Please note that you can deploy cloud based DR, even if your base infrastructure in not in the Cloud.
However, the most ideal scenario is that both your IT infrastructure and DR should be powered by the Cloud. This results in an overall ecosystem that is cohesive and complements each other.
A cloud powered DR solution relieves the deploying entity of the hassle of maintaining a dedicated DR site, which results in huge savings of both capital and revenue nature expenditures. The other great benefit of Cloud powered DR is instant scalability.
Whenever your critical data bottom-line changes, or the sheer volume of data increases, the cloud powered DR solution or service can instantly be scaled up. All this can be achieved in the Cloud without deploying any additional hardware resources.
How Does Cloud DR Work?
The cloud powered DR is mainly comprised of two core components. The first element comprises of taking and maintaining regular “snapshots” of your virtual machines (VMs) and other critical data.
The relative interval of these snapshots varies with your unique data needs. This interval generally varies between a few days to even just a few hours or minutes. The more intense DR policy you want to pursue, the more cloud resources would it tend to utilize.
The second most critical component of Cloud DR is storing these snapshots or backups at various data centers. This is where the capabilities and data center footprint of your Cloud Service Provider (CSP) will matter a lot.
Say one of your main data centers in USA is hit by a storm. With a cloud provider like dinCloud, which has a global footprint of highly connected data centers, we will initiate the DR for your enterprise over one of our data centers located in Asia and so on.
Cloud DR is Cost Efficient
A cloud based DR strategy is not only resource efficient, but also cost effective in the long run. In the Cloud, you pay only for the resources that you have actually consumed. This concern is further alleviated if you have a flat rate subscription based pricing arrangement.
Why Prefer dinCloud for DR?
Firstly, dinCloud has a global footprint of state of the art data centers. So, if there is some disruption in Asia, your core operations would be shifted over to one of our data centers located in USA. This gives you un-paralleled peace of mind.
Our global data center footprint is further supplemented with a flat rate subscription based pricing model. This means there would be no hidden charges to worry about once you entrust your infrastructure, DR or both needs to dinCloud.
Conclusion
In today’s business environment, a robust DR strategy is not an option, but a necessity. Contact dinCloud for more details on our state of the art Cloud and DR solutions that are both reliable and cost effective.
