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E-Guide

CLOUD DISASTER

RECOVERY: IS YOUR

ORGANIZATION READY?

SearchDisaster

Recovery


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Crafting a clouddisaster recoveryplan

Cloud-based disasterrecovery servicegrabs spotlight

Disaster recoverycosts: The cloud vs.in-house DR

CLOUD DISASTER RECOVERY: IS YOUR ORGANIZATION READY?

SCLOUDADOPTIONGROWS,cloud computing

is becoming one of the most popular

enterprise options for disaster recovery.

This e-guide provides guidance for decid-ing if cloud DR is right for your business and how you can set up a

successful cloud DR strategy.

A


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CRAFTING A CLOUD DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN

A disaster recovery plan helps an organization protect its data in the event

of a natural disaster, unplanned downtime or other negative events. As

cloud adoption grows, cloud computing is becoming one of the most popular

enterprise options for disaster recovery. Cloud-based disaster recovery can

involve a simple file back-up in the cloud, or a complete replication in standby

mode ready to take over production duties.

When implementing a cloud disaster recovery (DR) plan, organizations

must consider a range of factors, including providers, management and security.

These five frequently asked questions will help you decide if cloud DR is right

for your business, and how to set up a successful blueprint for your DR strategy.

HOW DO I GET STARTED WITH A CLOUD DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN?

A cloud DR plan is key to control costs during downtime and quickly and

efficiently restore data. Not having a cloud DR plan is like being stranded

without a map and not knowing where you are or how long it will take to get

back home.


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Before mapping out your plan, look at your DR budget to see what you canafford. Then identify and prioritize data, services and applications into three

categories: critical, important and ancillary. Find out how long these services

and applications can be down before it negatively impacts the business. When

devising your plan, make sure it is possible to restore data in multiple situa-

tions, including a single system loss, a multiple node failure or a complete main

data loss.

WHAT MAKES CLOUD DR DIFFERENT FROM OTHER DR OPTIONS?

In a cloud DR model, organizations store copies of their data in the cloud. Cloud

DR works well with small and large organizations because it reduces the need

for additional data center space, infrastructure and other IT resources. When

compared to other DR options, cloud DR is generally the most cost-effective.

For instance, unlike traditional DR systems, there is no need to worry about

power and cooling costs. Additionally, organizations only have to pay for

the resources they consume. Because the cloud offers remote management

capabilities, cloud DR can also reduce recovery time.


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HOW SHOULD I CHOOSE A CLOUD DR PROVIDER?Due to high demand, there are more than 170 disaster recovery as a service

(DRaaS) providers. These providers manage the activation and recovery of

virtual machines in the cloud. The most popular service providers are Amazon

Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google, but smaller vendors have also

entered the race. Large DRaaS providers, however, often have a broader range

of DR services than smaller vendors. For example, larger providers might allow

you to choose the region in which your data is stored. The downside to choosing

a large provider is the cost; users typically pay for the storage they consume,

along with bandwidth and storage I/O. Smaller vendors are often cheaper

and offer more flexibility in pricing, which might be a better fit for smaller

organizations.

When choosing a provider, evaluate the services they offer and if they fit

your needs. There are many DR services to choose from, ranging from simple

data recovery to virtual machine mounting to full disaster recovery within

the service providers data center. In addition, ask potential providers critical

questions about their DR services, such as the percentage of customers they

can support during a regional disaster.


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WHAT ARE BEST PRACTICES FOR MANAGING A CLOUD DR PLAN?Maintaining a cloud disaster recovery plan requires a large amount of

management. Before disaster hits, know the location of your physical and

virtual servers and who needs access to them in order to restore service. To keep

track, experts recommend having a directory system in place. Successful DR

management requires restoring systems according to service level agreements,

preventing negative impacts to the business and meeting RPO and RTO goals.

DR managers should test VM-based recovery systems to ensure provisioning

is properly configured, and run tests that simulate a real outage. Testing allows

you to learn how the process works, and how much time it will take before

services are restored.

HOW DO I MAKE SURE MY CLOUD DR ENVIRONMENT IS SECURE?

Security is crucial in any DR plan. Companies often fail to address how

their normal security controls will fare during downtime. The last thing

a company wants to experience is a security breach alongside a recovery

situation. Security and incident response are tied together in the sense that

the more security controls a business implements, the more efficiently it can

respond to data breaches, malware or even a natural disaster. To make sure


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your DR plan is secure, test your environment and use vulnerability scanningtools. Additionally, ensure your recovery site has updated antivirus and firewall

protection. If using third-party recovery, keep in mind that it may be multi-

tenancy, so make sure your access controls are protected.


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CLOUD-BASED DISASTER RECOVERY SERVICE GRABS

SPOTLIGHT

In the modern IT world, data protection is an essential requirement for

delivering business continuity in an IT disaster. Data is the lifeblood of all

enterprises and a valuable asset that requires having efficient processes in

place to ensure the business can access critical systems in a timely fashion.

The cost of downtime can be thousands of dollars per hour depending on the

type and size of the organization.

Disaster recovery (DR) was once seen as an all-or-nothing scenario

-- the button was pressed because the company had experienced a major

disaster in its IT services that were deployed on a monolithic infrastructure

such as the mainframe. The traditional DR model was based on tape backup,

with secondary backup tapes stored offsite. This model can incur significant

downtime, as tapes must be retrieved before data and applications can be

restored. Organizations that required faster restore times replicated data to in

their own secondary facilities, or used shared services offered by DR specialists


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that provided on-demand recovery capabilities. However, these models werevery expensive.

The Internet, virtualization and the evolution of public clouds has provided

a much more practical opportunity for businesses of all sizes to implement

a BC/DR plan without heavily investing in additional data center space.

Operations can be moved to the cloud on demand as required, via a cloud-

based disaster recovery service, either in a controlled fashion or as part of an

unplanned emergency. As such, it is more appropriate to talk about business

continuity as the process of ensuring IT services are continuously available,

with disaster recovery being the process of migrating services to a secondary

location.

CLOUD DR STRENGTHS

Today, applications are likely to be much more widely distributed, running in

virtualized environments or (in the future) on containers. This has changed

the backup paradigm and shops have more flexibility to recover all or part of

IT services where required. With a cloud-based disaster recovery service,

businesses can:


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Provide continuity for their operational services, regardless of wherethey are delivered from

Perform tactical failover to secondary services in the event of a hardware

or software failure in some (or all) of their IT systems

Perform controlled failover of workloads to enable maintenance of other

components such as the network or the environmental infrastructure

Migrate workloads to cope with unplanned demand or growth

Test DR capabilities on demand with no impact to the primary systems

Of course, the primary focus of BC/DR is to meet the service-level

agreements and objectives provided to the business. This means meeting RTO

(recovery time objectives) and RPO (recovery point objectives) metrics on

an application-to-application basis. Depending on an organizations specific

RTO/RPO requirements, there are three main cloud DR models:

Data only. The DR process focuses on ensuring a backup copy of data is

available on the cloud platform and represents the lowest level of recovery.

This means protecting data such as that sitting on file servers, including

home directories and shared folders. In the event of a disaster, the data can be

accessed from the DR location in the cloud. Depending on the amount of data


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that must be restored, downtime can be significant and even require physicallyshipping data back to the primary site on an appliance to restore.

Application-based. The DR process focuses on replicating application data

into the cloud to a secondary deployment of the application. Data is moved

using native application capabilities or a third-party product. Failover consists

of repointing access to the application running in the cloud (typically through

DNS changes). The secondary application instance is running permanently in

the cloud, receiving data on a periodic basis.

Virtual machine image. The DR process replicates an entire VM image,

including data, to the cloud. The VM image itself is dormant (not running) until

required, at which point it can be powered up and accessed, typically through

DNS changes. VM image backup can also be used as a method of protecting

physical (bare metal) application deployments through P2V replication.

CLOUD DR ISSUES

Of course, moving to a cloud-based disaster recovery service has issues. Many

of the following examples could be experienced when deploying any DR system;

however, some are more particular to cloud deployments.


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Network bandwidth. Bandwidth is an issue from a number of angles. First,you must have enough throughput capability between the primary site and the

cloud to ensure data can be replicated in a timely fashion without too much

lag in concurrency (which affects RPO). Second, you need enough bandwidth

available to recover changed data back to the primary site once the DR issue is

over. Third, you must be able to access services from the cloud, either from the

internal business network or from the Internet with client-facing applications.

Network security. Data moving to the cloud will be outside of the protection

of the private network in the data center, so it must be encrypted in flight at a

minimum. Compliance or other regulatory restrictions may require data to be

encrypted at rest when offsite. This can have implications on how applications

are implemented onsite, to ensure that the encryption process does not

interfere with normal operations.

Network addressing. As application workloads are moved to the cloud, IP

addresses will change. When primary and secondary application servers are

kept onsite, IP addressing can be managed relatively easily, either through

implementing a level 3 network between sites or by using routing. Moving an

application to the cloud will require changes to DNS (to point to the new server/

data location) and modification to the application itself in some cases.


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Network latency. Running applications from the cloud rather thanonsite may cause performance problems due to increased latency. This can

occur if only part of a service is migrated into DR with issues experienced in

intercommunication between on and offsite services.

Licensing. DR instances of applications require purchasing licenses,

depending on the terms of the application vendor. These license options may

be different for cloud implementations or, in the worst case, not supported.

Cost. The cost of implementing DR will include providing the cloud

services, additional network capacity, licensing dedicated backup software

and extra application licenses. All of these may vary depending on the way in

which cloud DR is delivered.

CHOICES: DIY OR BUY?

Should you build the DR capability yourself or buy a cloud-based disaster

recovery service or product? Data only-based DR can be implemented relatively

simply, by copying data to a cloud-based file service, or using products such as

Acronis Cloud Backup or Zettas DataProtect.

Application-based DR can be achieved by creating a target virtual machine

with a cloud service provider and implementing replication at the application


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level. Of course, the IT organization will be responsible for ensuring the DRVM image is suitably maintained (patched, upgraded) to keep in step with the

production deployment. In addition, if failover is invoked, then the application

teams will need to be involved to move data back after a failover. Certain

database-based replication products do not support incremental replication

of data back to the primary database instance (even if they technically work),

which may present a problem.

VM replication provides the ability to move an entire application to

the cloud as a virtual machine. This is a good idea when there are complex

application/server dependencies, such as Microsoft SharePoint, as there is no

need to build and maintain a separate VM image. Products are available from

vendors such as Zerto which integrate into the hypervisor and replicate all I/O

to the cloud instance. In a recovery situation, the cloud-based image is used to

run the production service, following any configuration amendments, such as

setting IP addresses and matching to the DR hardware specification.

With most block-based replication products, the cloud image can appear

to be a crash-consistent copy of the application that can subsequently require

extended recovery on startup. This is where the ability to test the recovery

image becomes critical. Testing means bringing up the application in an


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isolated manner in disaster recovery mode that allows integrity checks to beperformed without impacting the production application.

COMPARING CLOUD DR SERVICES

What should buyers look for when reviewing a cloud-based disaster recovery

service? Here are a few additional pointers:

Cost basis. How is the service charged; per TB of storage or per VM? Are

there additional charges for running in DR mode?

Time limitations. How long can I run the service in DR mode? Are there

any restrictions on how many systems I can fail over?

How does failback work? Can I incrementally fail back to production

(take back only the changes) or do I need to restore all my data?

Does the service offer extended protection? If I am in DR mode, can I also

replicate my data to a third copy until I return to production?

A cloud-based disaster recovery service offers flexibility for providing

data protection to on-premises environments. As applications evolve, we will

perhaps see the distinction between DR and dispersed applications start to


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blur, with DR providing both application protection and scalability. Whateverhappens, the need to provide application resiliency and data protection will

always remain.


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DISASTER RECOVERY COSTS: THE CLOUD VS. IN-HOUSE DR

Disaster recovery is becoming increasingly important to organizations of all

sizes. But with DR budgets increasing only slightly, IT planners are looking

at the cloud as a way to lower their disaster recovery costs. While the cloud

offers some excellent capabilities for disaster recovery, is it truly a cheaper

alternative than an in-house approach?

There are several cloud disaster recovery options available. The most

common approach is using the cloud as a backup target. In the event of a

disaster, the organization relocates to another facility and either begins

downloading (restoring) the backup data or waits to have the data shipped to

them on hard drives or tape.

The value of the cloud in this situation is that it provides an off-site copyof data thats accessible from virtually any location. More importantly, that

location does not need to be defined in advance. Businesses avoid investing in

a second site or paying for that site until there is an actual disaster.

The downside to this approach is the time it takes to recover data from the

cloud. While data deduplication improves backup speed, it has virtually no


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value during the recovery process. For this reason, most IT planners are betteroff having data physically sent to them via overnight or same-day delivery.

The challenges associated with recovering data from the cloud created a

second market: cloud disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS). Cloud DRaaS

allows an organization to run instances of its applications in the providers

cloud. The obvious advantage is that the time to return the application to

production, assuming networking issues can be worked out, is greatly reduced

because there is no need to restore data across the Internet.

However, there are some disadvantages to this approach, most notably

the performance of applications running in the cloud. There are also potential

migration issues when returning the application to the subscribers internal

data center.

SECONDARY SITE COSTS CAN ADD UP

The obvious factor in reducing a cloud providers disaster recovery costs is

the elimination of the secondary data center. Many organizations dont have a

secondary site. For those that do, whether it is suitable as a DR site is another

question. Making the second site DR-ready may require new IT staffing and

upgrades to the network, storage and server infrastructures.


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TIME-TO-RECOVER EXPENSES CAN GOBBLE CASH

Another DR cost consideration is the time to return to operations. When

organizations use the cloud just for backup storage, the time to recover to the

DR site can be hours or, in some cases, days. This does not include the time

required to find a DR site and get servers, networking and storage shipped in.

The second option, DRaaS, provides faster recoveries and eliminates the

need for emergency hardware shipments. However, some providers wont

commit to anything less than 10-hour recovery times and only allow companies

to run a few applications during the disaster.

Some providers also charge the subscribing organization an additional

hourly cost while the application is running in their cloud. A prolonged outage

of 30 or more days could get quite expensive.

LONG-TERM STORAGE CAN GET PRICEY

The big cost of cloud disaster recovery is the price of storage. While the cloud

is almost always cheaper initially, its the recurring bills that may make it more

expensive over time. The longer data is stored in the cloud, the more expensive

it becomes. If an organization is going to use the cloud as an archive for years of

backup data, it can become more expensive than on-premises storage.


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The best value would be to use the cloud to store only the latest copy of data,the version most typically needed in a disaster. The working data set grows

much more slowly than the total data set, which keepscloud storage costs under

control. Making sure that only active data (data that has been accessed in the last

30 days, for example) is in that working set could reduce this cost even further.

IS CLOUD TRULY THE LOWER PRICED OPTION?

In the battle over disaster recovery costs, the cloud clearly has an advantage

if there is no secondary site thats DR-capable. Typically, the costs to equip

and maintain a second site overshadow even the ongoing costs of a cloud

alternative. This is especially true if the organization can put up with an outage

long enough to use a cloud backup option.

DRaaS is a viable option for those organizations that need a quicker

recovery. But the organization needs to be aware of the following importantconsiderations:

How long it will take to recover an application

What the performance of that application will be like during the disaster

state

The costs associated with running its application in the providers cloud


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However, the real stumbling block is storage. The cost to pay for the same10 TB of data storage, every billing period for years, can be expensive. Move that

capacity number to 100 TB or 1 petabyte, and the ongoing cost of cloud storage

could become so challenging that it may be less expensive to keep DR in house.


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