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Connectivity is a major concern with the businesses of today. While being online is well and good, it sure isn’t an easy task, especially if your business is situated in a disaster prone zone.
Any kind of interruption in service is termed as being a disaster these days. While in the earlier times, this term was only associated with natural calamities such as floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc., and some manmade ones like arson,things are different these days and it has come to include cyber-attacks, industrial sabotage, ransomware, etc. too in its definition.
Not just these, if there is any slight interruption in services or applications, that too comes under the purview of disaster.
The one constant among all these changes has been the amount most organizations keep aside for Disaster Recovery (DR), which is minuscule. Most companies seek effective disaster recovery plans to keep their data and applications safe, albeit at very low costs.
In most organization, the amount of data to be protected is huge, and it keeps increasing every single second. So, the key aspect here is storage.
What DR services do
Most DR services offer features such as backup, archiving, and recovery. Let us understand these terms first.
Read more at : Choosing The Right Solution For Disaster Recovery
Backup
This term means keeping a copy of the data to be used in case of a loss or failure. This step is undertaken by most companies, which keep their backup for some years, usually between three and seven. Now if these companies depend on the cloud for backup, that would mean their having to rent the capacity to store the backup of each day for their decided upon particular length of time. Now the thing is that if you have a gigantic amount of data backup to store, cloud backup and associated storage may not be as cost-effective as doing it on your own.
Archiving
This is the term used when data is to be stored for a really long time. It is suggested that when data is archived, its final copy should be placed in two separate locations in two different formats. Most organizations archive their data for at the very least seven years, and many store it for far longer. If a company has to archive data, cloud hosting solutions may not be viable since it is not cost-effective to do that. This is because renting space for storing archived is not an inexpensive proposition. The recommendation in such cases is the storage of archived data in the company’s own storage space.
Recovery
This term is utilized when data is demanded once a disaster has been dealt with. In most cases of recovery, and specifically in disaster recovery, the latest copy of stored data is required. In case the very latest copy is unavailable, the most recent copy in terms of time is called for. In terms of such recovery, cloud solutions are deemed the best. This is because the most recent data copies are stored in the cloud. And that’s not all. Most cloud solutions providers offer computing resources in disaster recovery times. How this helps is you are saved from the hassles and costs related to keeping and maintaining a server and associated hardware at a remote location. This way, cloud disaster recovery solutions help you, the client, from the headaches related to backup storage capacity issues.
To achieve this purpose, the client must remember to store the very latest copy of their data in the cloud. There are various formats offered by cloud providers to the clients in terms of storing data. You can see which format suits your company best, and even ask them to customize their solution to suit your unique business requirements. For example, some clients prefer having their data stored on high-performance servers so that the return to operations is super quick. If you too desire such a service to ensure almost seamless operations, you can go for that particular feature.
Some clients prefer to run their applications in the cloud itself where the data is backed up automatically. This saves them from the task of sending data to the cloud for replication or storage in the form of backup. There are massive operational gains in this move, but the client has to be completely comfortable with the idea of moving all their data and applications to the cloud.
Cloud Disaster Recovery solutions are great since they offer compute resources almost immediately and there are no spare resources lying around going waste. You pay for the use of their services only when an actual disaster strikes or when you are trying to test out their services as a test.
This is a new-age service, and its benefits are far too many. With every passing second, more and more companies are moving to the cloud, and not without reason.
Sunil is a content analyst in a leading digital agency based in India. He loves to write on various topics including travel & technology.