What is Cloud Disaster Recovery?
By Matt Brennan
Disaster can strike at any moment. When we’re talking about your organization’s data, that disaster can be in the form of a data breach, malfunctioning hardware or software, or some form of inadvertent data loss.
Cloud disaster recovery simply allows your organization to regain access to lost data or information and recover critical systems. CDR can provide remote access to systems in a secure virtual environment.
The Advantages of Cloud Disaster Recovery
Traditional disaster recovery efforts used to require infrastructure to be able to prepare for the worst. The other option was to store your information at a data center. With the cloud, you can protect your business without this heavy investment in hardware. There’s also a significant reduction in downtime, a significant factor for all businesses.
In other words, cloud disaster recovery creates faster recovery times and lower costs than the traditional means of protecting your data. It’s a significant win for businesses.
How Cloud Disaster Recovery Works
Cloud disaster recovery uses the entire server, including the operating system, applications, patches and data, incorporating these components into a single software bundle or virtual server. This is opposed to traditional disaster recovery, which loads the servers with the OS and application software, and then patches to the last configuration.
The virtual server is then what is copied or backed up to an offsite data center, or spun onto a virtual host. All this can take place in a matter of minutes. In a virtual cloud environment, data can be migrated from one location to another much faster than it could in a traditional data recovery approach.
The Benefits of Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
There are several benefits to cloud-based disaster recovery.
- Less physical infrastructure is required with cloud-based disaster recovery. Virtual machines can be run in the cloud just as they are run on physical servers.
- A pay-as-you-go model means that customers only pays for the storage and services that they will need.
- You can connect to the cloud from anywhere in the world.
- It’s reliable. Companies can check their recovery point objective and recovery time, with accurate results. This strengthens any disaster recovery plan and gives businesses a clear idea of what it might look like.
- It’s easy to use. There are no significant hardware investments, and you can leverage provider expertise to gain specialized knowledge about your backup solutions.
- The manual processes associated with traditional recovery methods would be minimized by the cloud.
The technology associated with cloud-based disaster recovery continues to advance. And as it does, the benefits move right along with it. When companies invest in this type of data recovery option, their data becomes significantly safer in the event of a breach or data loss. These types of services allow you to protect your data and act in a proactive manner.
Should you lose your data and be unable to recover it, a data recovery specialist such as We Recover Data can help!
