From faster recovery times to significant cost-savings and guaranteed backup, the benefits of implementing cloud computing for both production and disaster recovery systems are worth deep consideration for any company running multiple, mission critical servers.
Below is a cheat sheet comparing the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing and a traditional disaster recovery plan.
General Problems with Traditional Backup & Recovery
- Highly error-prone, up to 40% failure rate
- High risk of hardware, software, patch or application incompatibilities
- Slow restore & recovery within physical environment
- Requires significant storage
Traditional Disaster Recovery
Tape Backup
- Cost-effective, but highly error-prone
- May take days or weeks to recover
- Complex, sequential recovery path
- Locate identical server
- Install operating system (OS)
- Update all OS patches to make production
- Install and configure all applications and patches
- Reload data
- Test and repeat above as errors suggest
Hot Site DR
- More than doubles the cost of the production environment
- Requires SAN/data replication between two sites for faster failover
- Within a traditional DR environment, it requires two fully replicated solutions
- The primary production center servers & applications must be replicated in the first and second data center on an ongoing basis.
Cloud Computing and Disaster Recovery
Cloud Computing for Disaster Recovery
- Lower overall costs – fewer physical servers to duplicate and maintain.
- Faster recovery time objective (RTO), reducing recovery time from days or weeks to minutes or hours.
- Ensures the entire server environment – OS, applications, patches & data – is synchronized and backed up.
- Eliminates hardware dependencies – servers become hardware agnostic.
- Allows non-identical hardware for production and disaster recovery – use premium physical server for production and a smaller one for disaster recovery without risking incompatability.
- Eliminates tape backup, offsite tape backup and cold site DR
- Faster online backup.
- Hot site DR is more cost-effective
Online Tech recently hosted a webinar on the benefits of cloud computing, backup and IT disaster recovery with Mike Klein and Rod Mach of HiperLogic. View the slides, watch the video and/or read the transcript of the Cloud Computing and Disaster Recovery webinar for more details about how cloud computing changes disaster recovery.
Some very relevant points. Some thoughts:
1. You need to consider if you are talking Public or Private clouds. If private, then you may not be getting the benefit discussed here (as you likely have the physical aspects to deal with)
2. When looking at using a Public cloud for DR, you need to look at how “placing” that data an applications in that environment will affect its overall security. There are a number of security aspects of having things in a datacenter that will vanish when placed in a public cloud environment. That loss of controls needs to be expected an architected for. In particular, answer the following:
- Does my datacenter (and systems in it) provide controls around the security of sensitive information in transit? Does my cloud architecture provide similar controls? For example, most people consider the network within the datacenters to be private. Unless specific services are utilized, this is not the case with Public cloud. Think about the protocols used within the application, do they require more protection in a Public cloud environment?
- Does my datacenter (and systems in it) provide controls around the security of sensitive information at rest? Does my cloud architecture provide similar controls? For example, do you need to do anything different for data in the DB? How do you do key management, if applicable?
- Do you have any compliance requirements that would change if you go from a private datacenter to public cloud?
I concur that using the cloud for DR is a great thing (IMHO), but you need to make sure that you plan ahead!
Also Thu, I think you meant that using cloud for DR is more cost effective that Hot site DR but stated the opposite in your last bullet