Why is Cloud Disaster Recovery necessary for Enterprises?

Enterprise data is essential and data loss can prove damaging, sometimes even fatal. According to recent studies, most enterprises are considering employing disaster recovery while some state that they will consider it. This is alarming in light of the continuous ransomware attacks that make most of the news.

Cloud technologies are being adopted by enterprises to optimize their processes and increase their productivity. With cloud computation, enterprises have little need to setup environments or manage them; the cloud does that for them. Similarly, cloud backup is offering innovative ways to ensure that data is always recoverable and is being utilized by enterprises globally.

However, there’s a fundamental difference between backing up in the cloud and cloud disaster recovery.

Cloud Disaster Recovery & its necessity

Enterprises need disaster recovery because of the continuously growing threat of ransomware. And besides ransomware, there are also other sources of data loss such as localized disasters or natural disasters, accidental deletions, virus or malware and more. If an enterprise is backing up in the cloud, then the enterprise can recover this data. However, recovering from a backup and initiating a disaster recovery plan are two completely different things. Recovering from a backup is a time consuming process and is meant to restore data without considering the time restraints. Meanwhile, disaster recovery (DR) exists for the sole purpose of ensuring that data is recovered efficiently to reduce downtime and continue enterprise operations.

In other words, the basic difference between backup and disaster recovery is that one is meant to ensure data is recoverable while the other is meant to ensure that the enterprise operations continue with minimum downtime and disruption.

For instance, consider an enterprise employing an enterprise backup appliance for their backups locally and using either a cloud gateway appliance or cloud connect services to extend this backup in the cloud. If a disaster compromises the appliance, then the local backup is lost but the data is recoverable using the cloud. When using conventional restore, the data will take considerable time because the local copies are lost. Instead, DR prioritizes mission critical data and restores it to facilitate operational continuity. Then the remaining data is restored after operations are continued. This is also called granular level restore.

Instant Failover via Replication & Private Cloud

Another feature that enterprises can acquire is instant failover. This feature creates replicas of entire systems and then adds changes to systems as they are made. Enterprises can schedule replication jobs as per their preference. This enables enterprises to have a reliable source to fail over to in case disaster occurs and the primary setup is compromised.

Instant failover is ideal for enterprises that cannot tolerate disruption.

Conclusion

Conventionally, it is assumed that with backup there is little need to acquire DR. However, backup is not meant to ensure that enterprise operations endure reduced downtime. Therefore, it is necessary for enterprises that rely on operational continuity to provide their services. If enterprises are using backup appliances, then they can pair it with cloud gateway appliances and opt to use replication services and/or DR services.