As the data is increasing, so is the need to protect it. But what if an attack still happens? That is when you need a
disaster recovery plan (DR plan). Every organisation should necessarily have an IT disaster recovery plan so that they never fail at business continuity; no matter whether that was a natural or human-made disaster. There are different types of disaster recovery and various disaster recovery solutions. You need to plan your disaster recovery strategy accordingly.
Business people generally get confused between traditional disaster recovery and cloud-based disaster recovery.
The traditional DR consists of duplicating data and applications. This duplication and back-up are either on dedicated servers the storage is either at remote locations or on-premise. For all these things, you would need to employ a competent IT personnel who can test, back-up, and maintain all the infrastructure. As a result, the overheads and expenses would rise for all companies. And if the worst-case scenario happened, then restoring everything from all the back-up devices like CDs, tapes, DVDs and then initialising applications on back-up servers was hectic. The data transfer was definitely had errors and the time of recovery was prolonged like many hours or even days!
But, the picture has changed since the origination of the cloud. Everyone is moving their websites, blogs, and apps on cloud and hence the disaster recovery as well. Instead of spending so much on traditional DR model, people prefer
cloud-based disaster recovery model. You can get many benefits with the cloud, like high data resiliency with low cost, minimal recovery time, and pay-per-consume billing model. You get a failover cluster and a regular back-up service. After all, the best services at the lowest possible cost are what we all desire.
Let us check some critical differences between traditional DR vs cloud-based disaster recovery.
Traditional Disaster Recovery Plan
Has a subordinate physical disaster recovery site having extra data centre space, servers and network, plus employees, operational costs for all aspects of site maintenance.
A traditional DR site wakes up only at the time of a disaster or replicating data. One has to go from several disaster recovery plan steps to make such a site up and to run. Setting this site live takes an unavoidably long time and still possess the risk of data loss and business continuity.
There can be a failure in the connectivity of the main site and the DR site, and then manual operations are compulsory to re-start the functions. Of course, this leads to a significant loss in recovering and continuing the business.
Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Plan
One main benefit of a cloud-based disaster recovery service is that the main data centre location receives the snapshots of the virtual machine (VM). The customers pay only for what they use. The snapshots, off-state application storage, and data synchronisation between the main site and cloud DR site are the things that the client pays for. If a disaster happens, the clients will have to pay for IaaS based infrastructure when the back-ups and snapshots of the main server need to be fetched during failover.
Cloud disaster recovery plan is automated, and the recovery process can be live in seconds or maximum in minutes. Thus, the clients get the best business continuity experience.
You can begin your cloud DR process via just a laptop or any internet-connected device.
For providing DR, virtualised cloud platforms are properly suitable. Ideally, a cloud-based DR doesn’t need a significant resource share to orchestrate between it and the main site. The full-fledged resources run only when an actual disaster happens, and then the client pays for those resources. Automation feature helps in fetching the extra needed resources at the time of disaster detection. Due to this feature, the DRaaS provider can provide you with recovery in minimal time with no data loss and keeps your business going.
The inline benefit of cloud-computing is cost-effectiveness is still seen when peak resource demands get higher.
Cloud-based DR, therefore, can provide several advantages as the state of an application is maintained throughout at ultra-low cost in normal conditions and high usage of resources during disaster events. The hampered site can get back-up or additional resources in minutes or sometimes seconds! The security is never compromised when you choose the cloud-based DR. While the traditional DR is tiresome as servers have to be continuously physically available for the load that comes with disasters. Hence, traditional DR sites cause a higher idle capacity and uncontrollable cost-cuttings even through normal operations.
The best DRaaS providers can give you a perfect disaster recovery plan for your organisation with the following advantages –
- Automated feature for managing virtual platforms utilising minimum time for recovery throughout the failover.
- The pay-per-consume feature for lowering costs is always beneficial, especially for SMEs/SMBs
- High flexibility guarantees the transition from low to high resources only when needed
- The back-ups are regular and stored in remote and different geographical locations
- The high cost and hassle of sorting and synchronising the recovered data is reduced to as low as possible.
- Final Thoughts
Concluding this article, you must have got the difference between traditional DR and cloud-based DRaaS. Also, the importance of choosing one of the best disaster recovery solutions from the DRaaS provider cannot be ignored.
