I. What is cloud computing disaster recovery
Cloud computing disaster recovery is a backup and recovery strategy that applies not only to data but to the entire virtual machine, server, and enterprise network. Call it a strategy because companies need to decide for themselves how best to use such services.
Cloud-based Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions offer some notable advantages over conventional disaster recovery solutions, These traditional application scenarios typically involve a dedicated IT infrastructure that is maintained in a secondary facility or a removable storage medium running elsewhere.
Cloud disaster recovery achieves higher simplicity, faster recovery and lower costs in terms of both infrastructure and administrative costs. In short, the use of the cloud as a platform for disaster recovery provides a higher value added than traditional approaches, and it can actually make such a more efficient disaster recovery solution a viable option for many businesses, from micro to mega-scale.
Cloud computing disaster recovery is an attractive option for organizations of any size. This is because cloud computing disaster recovery has the advantage of speed and cost compared with traditional disaster recovery methods. As enterprise infrastructure continues to become more virtual, more and more data and IT operations are moving to cloud platforms. So their disaster recovery strategy needs to evolve.
On September 4, 2018, Microsoft’s Azure cloud service was interrupted suddenly because of cooling problems in the data center, affecting many users in the south central United States. An IT professional says,”Microsoft’s Azure cloud service was down for most of the day. Although we are a national company, all traffic goes through Dallas, Texas, so it has a big impact on our business. It causes many of our business processes to slow down. “
As a leading public cloud service provider, Microsoft Azure is not alone in its downtime. Both Google Cloud and Amazon AWS’s cloud platform have experienced downtime, adversely affecting their users.
A disaster is anything that causes an unscheduled outage of a server or application, and it is important to ensure that a disaster recovery plan is in place first. Such a definition means that a disaster can be caused by an isolated hardware failure, data damage on the storage system, or an administrator accidentally shutting down a server. It doesn’t have to be a flood or a tornado in the data center. In fact, most downtime does not involve a site-wide disaster.
Restore means restarting the application and reconnecting it to the user and other applications — not just to recover the data. In the past, efficient recovery required redundant infrastructure, but, thanks to new virtualization technologies, a secondary host that could run a critical virtual machine (VM) copy could now constitute a disaster recovery solution. A truly reliable disaster recovery solution takes a lot of effort, not just a few virtual machines in a cloud data center, but this technology can greatly simplify the recovery process and potentially reduce the cost of traditional disaster recovery solutions.
II. Advantages and disadvantages of different cloud computing disaster recovery methods
Cloud computing disaster recovery is more flexible than traditional forms of disaster recovery because subscribers have more disaster recovery solutions. For example, cloud computing users do not backup data from the data center to the tape, but have more options, including:
- Back up from the data center.
- Back up from the private cloud.
- Backup from the same cloud computing service for storing data.
- Backup from a hybrid cloud environment.
- Revert to the cloud instead of deploying internally.
Given the greater flexibility and relatively low cost of cloud computing disaster recovery, it is an attractive option, and many companies wisely consider its priorities first. In fact, any good cloud computing disaster recovery plan takes priority over asset disaster recovery. If disaster occurs, what data is critical and what is not?
For example, when it comes to data, there is the concept of hot storage, warm storage, and cold storage. “Hot data” refers to data that needs to be readily available. Of these three data types, “hot data” is the most frequently accessed data. “Warm data” refers to data that is accessed at a lower frequency than “hot data”, such as historical data for reporting purposes. Cold data is data that is rarely used but must be retained. The tiered approach to data notifies the relevant service-level protocol (SLA) and the associated cost of storing the data.
This concept of a temperature – like type applies to disaster recovery throughout the site:
A hot site is a complete copy of a production site. The aim is to minimize downtime in the event of a natural or man-made disaster.
The hot site has established a connection between the primary site and the secondary remote backup site. The recovery was delayed, but not as long as the cold site.
Cold sites are largely unprepared for disaster recovery, so when a disaster occurs, it takes a lot of time to get the site back online. Unsurprisingly, cold sites are the least costly option, although they may prove to be an expensive option from the point of view of total cost in the event of a disaster.
Cloud disaster recovery uses a similar model from cold to hot. Specifically, the customer can choose a backup (the slowest and least cost option), the lowest version of the environment, a partial version of the environment or a complete (multi-site) disaster recovery, This is an enterprise backup replication method between Storage Area Networks (SAN) that can be run on cloud platforms and internally deployed data centers. The benefit of multiple sites is that traffic is rerouting to the cloud platform during the recovery process.
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Ie-lab Li Qiang Wei
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