Disaster recovery (DR) is about preparing for and recovering from a disaster. Any event that harms your business’ continuity or finances could be a disaster. This disaster could be a hardware or software failure, a network outage, a power outage, physical damage to a building like fire or flooding, human error, or another significant disaster.
Disaster Recovery of the past – On-premises
The essential element of traditional disaster recovery is a secondary data center, which can store all redundant copies of critical data, and to which you can fail over production workloads. A traditional on-premises DR site generally includes the following:
- A dedicated facility for housing the IT infrastructure, including maintenance employees and computing equipment.
- Sufficient server capacity to ensure a high operational performance level, including overprovisioning in order to tolerate peak load.
- Internet connectivity with sufficient bandwidth to successfully replicate to the secondary data center.
- Network infrastructure, including firewalls, routers, and switches, to ensure a reliable connection between the primary and secondary data centers and provide data availability.
With this in mind, it’s understandable that traditional disaster recovery is often too complex for many to manage and monitor. Moreover, the support and maintenance of a physical DR site can be costly and time-consuming. When working with an on-premises data center, you can expand your server capacity only by purchasing additional computing equipment, which can require large capital expenditures, time, and effort.
Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
The primary goal of disaster recovery is to minimize the overall impact of a disaster on business performance. Disaster recovery in cloud computing can do just that, in a manner that is more cost-effective, while reducing risk and recovery times.
Testing is simplified when working with disaster recovery in the cloud. Cloud infrastructure can be turned on and off whenever you desire without impacting production environments.
Critical workloads can be failed over to a DR site to resume business operations in case of disaster. As soon as your production data center is restored, you can failback from the cloud and restore your infrastructure and components to their original state. As a result, business downtime is reduced, and service disruption is minimized.
The critical factor in On-premises and Cloud Disaster Recovery – Price
A crucial difference between on-premise and cloud storage is financial. Cloud-based software and cloud resources are treated as operational expenses (OpEx), because they are leased rather than purchased upfront. In contrast, on-premise software and hardware are treated as capital expenses (CapEx). They are typically purchased once as a capital expense.
Additional Advantages to Cloud Disaster Recovery
- Minimized recovery time during failovers due to automated virtual platforms
- Flexibility to change resources when you need to do so
- Remote geographical locations for the storage of backup data
- Ease of data recovery due to automation processes
- Free up your employees to focus on your core business
AllCloud and Amazon CloudEndure
AllCloud believes DR in the Cloud is the best option for our customers. We leverage AWS CloudEndure to protect our customer’s most critical data. CloudEndure DR continuously replicates your machines (including operating system, system state configuration, databases, applications, and files) into a low-cost staging area in your target AWS account and preferred AWS Region. In the case of a disaster, you can instruct CloudEndure DR to automatically launch thousands of your machines in a fully provisioned state in minutes.
By replicating your machines into a low-cost staging area while still being able to launch fully provisioned machines within minutes, CloudEndure DR can significantly reduce your disaster recovery infrastructure cost, while achieving RTOs (Recovery Time Objectives) and RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives) much lower than many traditional DR solutions.
Benefits of Cloud Endure
- Reduce downtime and protect against data loss
- Simplify implementation and increase reliability
- Protect enterprise applications and databases with a single tool
- Decrease your total cost of ownership
- Low licensing fees compared to other solutions out there
- You don’t need to have an AWS source environment to implement CloudEndure
AWS CloudEndure – Simple Cloud-based DR
CloudEndure Disaster Recovery minimizes downtime and data loss by providing fast, reliable recovery into AWS. The solution continuously replicates data from physical, virtual, or cloud-based infrastructure to a low-cost staging area that is automatically provisioned in any target AWS Region of your choice. During failover or testing, an up-to-date copy of applications can be spun up on-demand and be fully functioning in minutes.
- Continuous replication – CloudEndure Disaster Recovery provides continuous, asynchronous, block-level replication of your source machines into a staging area. This allows you to achieve RPOs of seconds, and RTOs of minutes, since up-to-date applications are always ready to be spun up on AWS if a disaster strikes.
- Low-cost staging area – Data is continually kept in sync in your target AWS Region in a lightweight staging area. The staging area contains low-cost resources that are automatically provisioned and managed by CloudEndure Disaster Recovery. This eliminates the need for duplicate resources and significantly reduces your disaster recovery total cost of ownership (TCO).
- Automated machine conversion and orchestration – In the event of a disaster or drill, CloudEndure Disaster Recovery triggers a highly automated machine conversion process and a scalable orchestration engine that quickly spins up thousands of machines your target AWS Region in parallel. This is what enables RTOs in minutes, rather than in hours (which is a typical RTO in traditional DR solutions). Unlike application-level solutions, CloudEndure Disaster Recovery replicates entire machines, including OS, system state configuration, system disks, databases, applications, and files. Therefore, when you launch your machines during a failover or drill, your machines will run just as they do on your source infrastructure. System and software reinstalls are not required.
- Point-in-time recovery – Granular point-in-time recovery allows you to recover applications and IT environments that have been corrupted as a result of accidental system changes, ransomware, or other malicious attacks. In such cases, you can launch applications from a previous consistent point in time rather than launching applications in their most up-to-date state. During the recovery, you can select either the latest state or an earlier state from a list of time points.
- Easy, non-disruptive drills – With CloudEndure Disaster Recovery, you can conduct disaster recovery drills without disrupting your source environment or risking data loss. During drills, CloudEndure Disaster Recovery spins up machines in your target AWS Region in complete isolation to avoid network conflicts and performance impact. Because you are leveraging AWS, there is no need to provision or pay in advance for the resources needed during the disaster recovery drill. CloudEndure Disaster Recovery’s automation also minimizes the manual work involved in conducting drills.
Enhance Your Disaster Recovery Strategy with the AllCloud DR Quickstart program
AllCloud’s 4-week Disaster Recovery Evaluation is a quick-start program teaming up with AWS CloudEndure. During the program, our AWS experts focus on ensuring your organization is getting optimal value from your existing infrastructure and has the building blocks for a successful cloud-based disaster recovery strategy. Contact our experts today!