How to use the Cloud for Business Continuity
The benefit of cloud is that it provides offsite management of data.
At predictable monthly costs, resources can be reserved in the event of an emergency, allowing businesses the ability to function and continue to generate revenue.
Setting Your Metrics
It’s important to determine your recovery point objective (RPO), which describes the acceptable amount of data loss measured in time, and recovery time objective (RTO), the amount of time that a business process must be restored after a disruption in order to avoid a break in business continuity (What “point-in-time” does the data need to be restored to?). After those metrics are decided, you’ll want to map to the underlying IT systems and infrastructure that support those processes, and begin the backup process.
A Tiered System
One benefit of using cloud computing for disaster recovery and business continuity is the ability to “tier out” or prioritize your data and systems, in order to determine how often it is backed up, and in case of a disaster, what needs to be restored first.
Using your RPO and RTO metrics, you should map out what systems and data are most critical, and what areas may be able to be down for a longer period of time with out adverse affects.
This tiered system is something that the cloud is an optimal solution to address. Generally with on-premise disaster recovery, companies are locked into buying one type of service that can’t be tiered out. This means that you pay more to constantly back up systems that may not need to be refreshed on an hourly basis.
With the cloud, you can customize a tiered service with a predictable monthly cost, saving investments that can be used for more strategic initiatives for the business.
A three tiered approach has been determined to be of highest value.
TIER ONE for online file backup and restore – This should be an agent-less/touch-less solution, that can handle databases, open files, email and should be fully automated.
TIER TWO should provide the same as TIER ONE with the addition of a local appliance for local backups. This should help with file level restoration and provide a quicker restore process for large data restores. In case of simple file deletion or corruption.
TIER THREE should provide Real Time data Replication with failover. Servers should be replicated and should there be any outage the network should failover to the replicated servers.
A local SERVER IMAGING OPTION should be provided to simplify the immediate restoring of mission critical servers in case of a crash. This should include the operating system and applications so the need to re-install becomes unnecessary. Imaging should be ongoing and managed with full and incremental images.
All of the three tiers should be fully managed and monitored by highly experienced senior level engineers.