Benefits of Disaster Recovery in Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing delivers faster recovery times and multi-site availability at a fraction of the cost of conventional disaster recovery.

Cloud computing, based on virtualization, takes a very different approach to disaster recovery. With virtualization, the entire server, including the operating system, applications, patches and data is encapsulated into a single software bundle or virtual server. This entire virtual server can be copied or backed up to an offsite data center and spun up on a virtual host in a matter of minutes.

Since the virtual server is hardware independent, the operating system, applications, patches and data can be safely and accurately transferred from one data center to a second data center without the burden of reloading each component of the server. This can dramatically reduce recovery times compared to conventional disaster recovery approaches where servers need to be loaded with the OS and application software and patched to the last configuration used in production before the data can be restored.

When introduced with the cost-effectiveness of online backup between data centers, tape backup no longer makes sense in the cloud. The cost-effectiveness and recovery speed of online, offsite backup makes it difficult to justify tape backup.

The cloud makes cold site disaster recovery antiquated. With cloud computing, site disaster recovery becomes a very cost-effective option where backups of critical servers can be spun up in minutes on a shared or private cloud host platform.

One of the added benefits of disaster recovery with cloud computing is the ability to finely tune the costs and performance for the DR platform. Applications and servers that are deemed less critical in a disaster can be tuned down with less resources, while assuring that the most critical applications get the resources they need to keep the business running through the disaster.

With changes in IT disaster recovery delivered by cloud computing, network replication becomes the critical path. With fast server recovery at an offsite data center, the critical path for a disaster recovery operation is replicating the production network at the DR site including IP address mapping, firewall rules & VLAN configuration.

Smart data center operators are providing full disaster recovery services that not only replicate the servers between data centers, but also replicate the entire network configuration in a way that recovers the network as quickly as the backed up cloud servers.