Disaster Recovery in the Cloud: Ensuring Business Continuity - Rahul S Kurkure, Founder and Director of Cloud.in

In the continuously evolving digital landscape, modern-day organizations acknowledge the need to secure critical data and ensure business continuity.  The possibility of enterprises falling victim to sudden events and putting themselves at risk is high without a disaster recovery (DR)plan in place.  Unexpected events could occur due to power outages, equipment shutdowns, cyberattacks, or natural disasters.  Under such circumstances, only a robust DR program can keep the business engine running and ensure the organization is profitable too.  Such DR programs are designed for both large enterprises and SMEs to safeguard themselves from any disasters.

Disaster recovery has evolved over time

Traditionally, the DR process was very straightforward, where data was backed up in tape drives which were physically transported by IT teams to a secondary site for storing at offsite locations. This process though effective, was complicated, time-consuming, and incurred significant costs.  Now in the era of cloud computing, DR has become a lot simpler and more effective with the flexibility and scalability of cloud.  These cloud-based DR solutions enhance the effectiveness in addition to streamlining the process.

Cloud-based DR solution offers several benefits

Accessibility:  Being a key feature of cloud storage, it enables data and applications to be retrieved from any location with an internet connection. 

Scalability: The cloud offers the flexibility to scale resources up and down based on the specific needs of businesses, enabling the latter to adapt to changing workloads and assign resources efficiently.

Cost-effectiveness: In the absence of significant investments in hardware, physical infrastructure, and maintenance, cloud-based solutions are cost-effective.  The pay-as-you-go model with cloud-based solutions eliminates upfront costs ensuring DR is accessible to businesses of all sizes.

Automated recovery processes:  The automated processes of cloud-based DR solutions enable to streamlining of recovery tasks and automate the recovery process.  This also accelerates the overall recovery process, reduces downtime, and minimizes the risk of human error.

Better compliance: All organizations have to adhere to regulations and a robust DR plan plays a key role here. The plan enables the identification of potential risks with the relevant procedures and disasters can be addressed in time ensuring the continuity of business operations.

Enhanced security: The DR plan includes data backup and other business continuity procedures, which can protect critical data from potential risks.  DR solutions provide robust security with identity and access management and advanced encryption features that are incorporated into them.

Geo-redundancy:  This practice of replicating and backing up data, applications, and servers in diverse geographic locations followed by cloud providers offers an added layer of protection in case of region-wide outages and hardware breakdowns.  It mitigates the risk of single-point failure and guarantees business operations continuity.

Steps for business continuity and DR plan

This plan provides a structured approach to overcome all disasters that act as a barrier to business continuity.

Access the infrastructure and outline the risks

A thorough assessment of the organization’s infrastructure, systems, and data should be the first step.  Evaluate all the risks that can have an impact on the infrastructure and each category of data.  Key applications and data sets have to be identified and all recovery efforts have to be prioritized. A comprehensive plan that outlines all the steps to be followed in the event of a disaster should be put in place to minimize the risks.  All stakeholders should be made aware of their roles and responsibilities.

Select the most appropriate cloud provider

Only a trustworthy cloud partner can help the organization with the effective implementation of the plan.  Factors such as reliability, scalability, usability, security measures, compliance standards, simplicity, and speed of recovery should be taken into consideration while assessing an ideal cloud provider, besides their track record in DR while selecting a cloud provider. The larger cloud providers also offer DR as a Service (DRaaS)  and have the necessary infrastructure and expertise in addition to a global presence.

Design a plan with recovery goals in mind

The plan should be designed to address the end-to-end recovery process, from backup to restore to cleanup. It is important to look at the Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) before concluding to adopt the appropriate recovery pattern to meet the criteria or values.  The recovery objectives should establish the highest and the lowest impact on the services offered by the organization.

Build DR cloud infrastructure

The organization should work with the cloud partner to configure different infrastructure components of the remote site in the cloud and set up each for DR.  Bear in mind, the number of these components that are required, how will the data be migrated to the cloud, user authentication, and access management.  The kind of security and best practices that are needed have to be implemented so that disasters are minimized which is another important aspect of building the DR cloud infrastructure.  It is important to ensure that critical data is regularly backed up to a secure cloud repository in addition to real-time replication of data and applications to a secondary data center.

Regular testing of the DR plan is mandatory

The final step is to test the DR plan regularly probably every quarter, to establish its effectiveness and address any potential issues, in time.  The monitoring and analysis of the backup infrastructure have to be done daily.  Various disaster scenarios can be simulated to evaluate the effectiveness of the recovery process.  As the business grows and changes are witnessed across people, processes, and technologies, the plan needs to be updated to reflect the changes in the infrastructure and related aspects, ensuring the organization is prepared for any emergency.

As organizations continue to steer the expanding digital landscape, DRi in the cloud becomes very critical.  By establishing this, organizations can protect their business operations, mitigate risks, and ensure business continuity.