- The pay-per-use pricing structure of cloud services make it a cheaper DR option, but there are gotchas you need to avoid, ranging from unexpected licensing costs to potential security vulnerabilities.
- You likely started on the path to cloud DR with consideration of cloud storage for offsite retention of backups. Systems recovery in the cloud can be a real value-add to using cloud as a backup target.
- Your cloud-based DR environment has to be secure and compliant, but performance also has to be “good enough” to operate the business.
- Location still matters, and selecting the DR site that optimizes latency tolerance and geo-redundancy can be difficult.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Keep your systems dormant until disaster strikes. Prepare as much of your environment as possible without tapping into compute resources. Enjoy the low at-rest costs, and leverage the reliability of the cloud in your failover.
- Avoid failure on the failback! Bringing up your systems in the cloud is a great temporary solution, but an expensive long-term strategy. Make sure you have a plan to get back on premises.
- Leverage cloud DR as a start for cloud migration. Cloud DR provides a gateway for broader infrastructure lift and shift to cloud IaaS, but this should only be the first phase of a longer-term roadmap that ends in multi-service hybrid cloud.
Impact and Result
- Calculate the cost of your DR solution with a cloud vendor. Test your systems often to build out more accurate budgets and to define failover and failback action plans to increase confidence in your capabilities.
- Define “good enough” performance by consulting with the business and setting correct expectations for the recovery state.
- Dig deeper into the various flavors of cloud-based DR beyond backup and restore, including pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site recovery. Each of these has unique benefits and challenges when done in the cloud.
Member Testimonials
After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this blueprint and what our clients have to say.
Client
Experience
Impact
$ Saved
Days Saved
Simcoe Muskoka Catholic District School Board
Guided Implementation
10/10
$10,000
10
The guidance through the tool was extremely helpful.
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