12-27-21 | Blog Post
Cloud DR (disaster recovery), also known as DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) puts a twist on traditional DR practices so that organizations can achieve greater cost savings while also achieving more security and reliability in the wake of disaster. Traditional site-to-site data replication has inherent expenses that cloud DR solutions bypass, including the upfront costs of building out a geographically redundant data repository some 500 miles away.
Keeping your business online in the wake of disaster, whether that be a human-caused, natural, or cyber disaster, is crucial to avoiding costly downtime. And while disaster recovery should be a comprehensive plan that accounts for people just as much as data, cloud-based DR alleviates the stress associated with the data and network side of your DR plan.
Here are 5 benefits of moving to a cloud-based DR plan:
An effective DR plan requires that your data be backed-up, replicated, and stored off-site about 500 miles, or more, away. This helps prevent regional disasters from knocking out both your on-premise data center and your off-premise DR repository. The upfront capital expenditures associated with building a second data repository, however, are numerous. There are warehouse costs, maintenance costs, hardware costs, and transportation costs if data is stored on disks and tapes. In the cloud, your business can move its DR plan to an operational costs model where getting data off-premise and building in redundancy can be achieved from day 1.
Some cloud providers like NewCloud Networks allow organizations to perform failover testing at least once a year as part of providing DR services. This allows your organization to easily test your DR plan and quickly address issues as they arise. Many organization that aren’t utilizing a cloud-based DR plan fail to perform tests on their DR plans which is risky considering disasters could arise.
In the cloud, your business can achieve preparation for all sorts of disasters, including human error, natural disasters, and cyber-attacks. Backing up and replication your organization’s data to the cloud can assure that there is always a copy of your data available when you need to failover.
Data redundancy allows your organization to store its data in two separate places. In the cloud, achieving geographical redundancy is made easy. If your business operates in Los Angeles, your cloud-based DR plan could incorporate storing your data both on-premise in LA and more than 500 miles away in Denver or Dallas.
In the cloud, your organization will experience ultra-low latency. This is imperative when your organization needs to failover to replicas. Speedy recovery is crucial to mitigate downtime and high latency could mean added downtime. While performing backup and replica jobs to the cloud, ultra-low latency makes these jobs quick and effortless.
More organizations are moving to cloud DR solutions due to the above reasons. Replicating your data and moving it off-site into the cloud is crucial to your business’ continuity amidst human error, cyber-attacks, and natural disasters.
