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Tuesday, 11 October 2016 ehdf

Disaster Recovery as A Service Not Far Away

A logical next step after end users have adopted SaaS and IaaS is disaster recovery as a service.

In today’s world of disturbed geo political situations and changing climates, the need for business continuity and disaster recovery solutions is becoming ever important. Once regarded as prohibitive in terms of costs, the arrival of cloud based solutions and regional hosting service providers, is making top management executives and IT administrators re look and revisit the approach to business continuity solutions. While top management executives and IT administrators may shy away from using hosting service providers to manage their critical IT infrastructure and business critical applications, the enormous savings in costs and the enormous gains in deploying a cloud based business continuity solution has meant that such cloud based services are being increasingly considered and tested.

This is especially true for those fast growing organizations that are competing in the market place and yet have insufficient funds and know-how to deploy IT departments on a large enough scale to sustain traditional and expensive disaster recovery and business continuity solutions. For such organizations cloud based solutions are rapidly growing in popularity, since they can now claim entry into business continuity compliance requirements, once the sole bastion of all but the largest of global enterprises.

A cloud based infrastructure typically includes IT equipment including servers, storage, networking, applications, security which are part of an organization’s IT department and are hosted by a service provider and made available to end customers over a network, which is usually the internet. The service provider invests in the IT equipment and is further responsible in its optimal technical performance, while being made available for usage by end users who pay on a per-use basis.

Whether caused by technical failures, natural phenomena, or regional political disturbances, unplanned downtime must always be addressed by IT organizations in order to maintain business in a fully operational state. Disaster recovery and business continuity is now becoming an ideal use case for taking advantage of cloud based services.

In the past, organizations have implemented disaster recovery solutions by selecting the most critical of their operations and using a combination of data replication, mirroring, snapshots and backups. This has resulted in over protection and over investment for the most critical applications and under protection and under investment for lower tier applications, and corresponding loss of data and business failures at the time of crises. The exponential growth of data traffic is bringing to close the viability of business continuity solutions that rely on traditional computing technologies due to rapid increase of networking costs and storage requirements. Industry surveys also indicate that global businesses with growing 24×7 digital consumers can no longer accept business interruption of more than three hours and loss of business data of more than one hour.

IT organizations are therefore under pressure to accept these recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives that specify the maximum losses in interruption that business managers are ready to accept in the event of failure of any type. Availability of cloud and virtualization solutions and cloud service providers are making it possible to now extend the protection of continuity to wider areas of the business at much lower costs and complexity.

To synchronize between a live site and an offline recovery site, three typical stages have traditionally been adopted and the same are carried forward into cloud based solutions including cold, warm and hot recovery sites. Cold sites have less investment and take much longer to recover, while hot sites have extensive investment and are near ready for switch-over.

A cold recovery site is typically a disconnected replica of the live site and go live at the times of recovery is a manual step by step build up process, with possible failures and delays. A cold site is also not usually a routinely tested and standby site. A hot recovery site on the other hand maintains near immediate application and data availability through a high speed network connection, server clustering, and synchronous replication. A hot site also goes through regular maintenance, upgrades, and is usually a complex and expensive solution.

Adding to the costs of traditional disaster recovery and business continuity solutions is the fact that such sites need to be geographically remotely located, require duplication of most of the IT assets, and if warm or hot sites need to have their share of skilled IT resources to manage their state of data and application readiness. Lastly, any type of recovery site whether cold, warm, or hot needs to be tested in terms readiness, adding to the costs of managing traditional solutions.

Cloud based solutions offer key advantages over traditional disaster recovery solutions. An integral part of a cloud solution is virtualization of IT asset resources thereby reducing the cost of replicating IT assets for the recovery site and the reduced cost of managing a shared recovery site through a cloud hosting service provider. Another key benefit is the elastic aspect of using IT assets that are on the basis of pay as you go rather than upfront purchase. Moreover, cloud service providers tend to be hosted across multiple data centres, regionally or globally, and therefore by default are in a position to meet the end user service requirements of delivering from a remote site to wherever the end user locates their disaster recovery site. The technology cost of meeting such service level agreements primarily around network connectivity and data centre redundancy are aggregated by the cloud service provider across multiple end users, thereby reducing the per end user unit cost.

Cloud service provider service agreements also allow lower recovery time and recovery point objectives at a cheaper cost than traditional solutions for end users, by choosing the right selection of options from within a service provider’s portfolio of offerings. Industry surveys indicate that cloud virtualization with replication of virtual machine images lower disaster recovery time as well as disaster recovery testing times. Another benefit of working with cloud service providers is the compliance and regulatory requirements they follow around standards of data security and data integrity.

Despite these obvious benefits of reduced costs and availability of best practices, end users are still reluctant to allow a cloud based, third party supplier to manage a critical function like business continuity and disaster recovery. Their stated concerns revolve around loss of control, reduced investment in infrastructure, and security. However, if end users start looking at SaaS solutions for applications and IaaS solutions for compute requirements, their inhibitions in cloud based services may be reduced.

Considering the growing trend of digital transformation and always on-business, the coming years are likely to see disaster recovery as service also grow into a standard cloud offering.

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