Cloud Disaster Recovery

Cloud Disaster Recovery (CDR)

Cloud disaster recovery (CDR) is a cloud-based managed service that helps you quickly recover your organization’s critical systems after a disaster and provides you remote access to your systems in a secure virtual environment.

How does cloud disaster recovery work?

Cloud disaster recovery takes a very different approach than traditional DR. Instead of loading the servers with the OS and application software and patching to the last configuration used in production, cloud disaster recovery encapsulates the entire server, which includes the operating system, applications, patches, and data into a single software bundle or virtual server. The virtual server is then copied or backed up to an offsite data center or spun up on a virtual host in minutes. Since the virtual server is not dependent on hardware, the operating system, applications, patches, and data can be migrated from one data center to another much faster than traditional DR approaches.

Types of Cloud Disaster Recovery

Cloud-based data protection services are of three types:

  • Backup as a Service (BaaS)

  • Recovery as a Service (RaaS)

  • Disaster Recovery as a service (DRaaS)

Using BaaS, Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) backup and restore the contracted data. RaaS is an extension of BaaS, where applications are also restored from the cloud in addition to the data.

DRaaS is much more extensive than RaaS and includes cloud-based failover, in addition to backup and recovery services. DRaaS adoption is essential for organizations requiring 100% availability of their critical applications.


Advantages of DRaaS

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) includes several capabilities that are not found in the traditional backup and disaster recovery methods. These include:

  • Reliability, flexibility and high performance

  • Effective addressing of mobility and portability challenges

  • Consumption of much lesser operational resources

  • Rapid and immediate recovery of data in the event of a disaster

  • Quick restoration of normal operations

  • Significant savings in terms of software licenses and hardware


10 reasons your client needs to invest in disaster recovery

  • Minimize the impact of any disaster

  • Ensure continuous employee productivity

  • Become far more cost-effective

  • Meet compliance and regulatory requests from your clients’ financial, legal, and health industries

  • Access instant recovery

  • Reduce downtime of operations

  • Reduce potential financial losses

  • Reduce liability obligations

  • Minimize the risk of negative exposure

  • Facilitate crisis management


The threats

A client may believe that only natural disasters cause downtime with power outages that affect hardware. But software and people must also be considered. As technology develops, so too do the internal and external threats.

  • Natural disasters

    • Hurricanes, tornados, and fire can cause serious downtime by affecting facilities and infrastructure. What most clients may not understand is that only 6% of outages are caused by natural disasters.

  • Pandemics

    • This type of threat affects an organization’s people and, in the case of remote work, creates a whole host of planning scenarios IT departments may not have previously considered. There is a greater risk when data and devices live outside of IT’s regular infrastructure.

  • Hardware failure and software corruption

    • Hardware failure can be caused by a power outage. Software may become corrupt due to failed software updates, incorrect formatting of drives.

  • Human error with or without malicious intent

    • It happens. Many of us have accidentally deleted or overwritten something we didn’t mean to. A disgruntled employee might also wreak havoc with data and systems.

  • Cyberattacks

    • If even one employee’s machine is compromised, entire networks can become vulnerable. Attacks can happen quite quickly with weak passwords, falling for phishing scams, and clicking on malicious links.


Calculate the cost of downtime


These factors can be applied to your clients’ organizations, using costs and numbers from all of their departments to calculate their actual downtime cost per hour. Bottom line? Downtime risks losing big money.


Lost revenue + Lost productivity + Cost to recover + Intangible costs = Downtime cost (per hour)

Lost Revenue


This is fairly easy to comprehend. If your client’s business is down, they cannot generate revenue. Use the gross annual revenue to calculate the amount of revenue per hour that is lost during downtime for each business area.

Lost Productivity


The cost of downtime also increases when clients’ employees are unable to work or are forced to perform non revenue-related activities. Salaries or hourly wages are a fixed cost and must be paid regardless of how productive the employees are.

Cost to Recover


Often, clients don’t think about the costs associated with recovery and resuming normal business operations. Typical costs include: • Services and employee time required to recover lost data • Physical tools/devices that may need repair or replacement • Cost of lost data

Intangible costs


Any damage to reputation or brand results in dollars lost. The slightest downtime can cast an insurmountable shadow over your client’s business – and how that downtime is handled can be the difference between recovering and going under.


One solution for any workload

Physical and virtual machines

  • Windows

  • Linux

Virtualization platforms

  • VMware vSphere

  • Microsoft Hyper-V

  • Oracle x86 VM Server

  • Linux KVM

  • Citrix XenServer

  • Red Hat Virtualization

Applications

  • Microsoft Exchange

  • Microsoft Active Directory

  • Microsoft SharePoint

  • Microsoft SQL Server