10 Secrets for Successful Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

• The pay-per-use pricing structure of cloud services make it a cheaper DR option, but there are gotchas you need to avoid, ranging from unexpected licensing costs to potential security vulnerabilities.
• You likely started on the path to cloud DR with consideration of cloud storage for offsite retention of backups. Systems recovery in the cloud can be a real value-add to using cloud as a backup target.
• Your cloud-based DR environment has to be secure and compliant, but performance also has to be “good enough” to operate the business.
• Location still matters, and selecting the DR site that optimizes latency tolerance and geo-redundancy can be difficult.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

• Keep your systems dormant until disaster strikes. Prepare as much of your environment as possible without tapping into compute resources. Enjoy the low at-rest costs, and leverage the reliability of the cloud in your failover.
• Avoid failure on the failback! Bringing up your systems in the cloud is a great temporary solution, but an expensive long-term strategy. Make sure you have a plan to get back on premises.
• Leverage cloud DR as a start for cloud migration. Cloud DR provides a gateway for broader infrastructure lift and shift to cloud IaaS, but this should only be the first phase of a longer-term roadmap that ends in multi-service hybrid cloud.

Impact and Result

• Calculate the cost of your DR solution with a cloud vendor. Test your systems often to build out more accurate budgets and to define failover and failback action plans to increase confidence in your capabilities.
• Define “good enough” performance by consulting with the business and setting correct expectations for the recovery state.
• Dig deeper into the various flavors of cloud-based DR beyond backup and restore, including pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site recovery. Each of these has unique benefits and challenges when done in the cloud.