Data has become an integral part of the companies. It is necessary to keep all the process running constantly. Otherwise, a small downtime may cause huge loss.

Many companies cannot afford even seconds of downtime as that would cost millions of dollars and setting up a huge data center just for the protection of data is not a feasible option.  It would only be useful when a disaster happens.

No company would risk the loss of data and no company can ignore the potent attack of a hacker, ransomware, etc. Thus every company should consider shifting to a cloud disaster recovery plan.

What is Cloud Disaster Recovery Plan?

Cloud Disaster Recovery Plan provides an economical and easy manageable alternative to company as compared to off-premises disaster recovery plan.  Cloud Disaster Recovery is a cloud computing service offered as Infrastructure as a Service by providers. It is used to enable backup and recovery of client organization’s remote machines on a cloud-based infrastructure.

Benefits of Cloud Disaster Recovery Plan

Cost Efficiency

As compared to traditional servers, the cloud helps us to back up your data without setting up any server. It also offers “pay as you go” solution which saves us a lot of money when compared to the traditional system. This type of offer will benefit all kind of companies who doesn’t want to invest a huge amount on large servers and their recovery plans. For example,

Amazon EC2(Elastic Compute Cloud) is used to launch and create virtual servers. You can create as many servers as you want depending on your requirement. Using EC2 will not only save a lot of money on hardware but will also save money by charging only for the sessions used.

Flexibility and Scalability

Cloud offers a lot of flexibility by allowing companies to upscale and downscale whenever they want to. Suppose, a company wants to expand without investing a large amount of money, the company can upscale its services and downscale them in future to save cost. For example,

AWS Auto Scaling is used to monitor your website or application and adjust its capacity to maintain normal performance at lowest possible cost. Using AWS Auto Scaling, it is easy to scale multiple applications across multiple services in few minutes.

Auto Scaling also gives tips to optimize the usage, performance and cost for EC2 instances, Spot Fleets and Dynamo DB tables and indexes.

To progress in business, the company has to scale its resources to handle the data. Cloud backup is virtually infinite as compared to physical backup. Companies can grow their system by buying another instance and storage space whenever they want to scale up. They are not required to overinvest in servers and their maintenance.

Minimum Downtime

Downtime means the time for which the system was down. The minimum downtime is possible because of the redundant servers which are present across the globe.  Because of redundancy, if data gets erased or misplaced from one server, it can easily be retrieved from another server.

Lower RTO and RPO

RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) are two parameters which are used to measure the effectiveness of the Disaster Recovery Plan.

RPO measures the time gap between the last replication of data done on the server and the disaster. If replication occurs more frequently then we would lose minimum data. It is connected directly to the frequency of data replication. In short, RPO is the amount of data the company can afford to lose at the time of disaster.

RTO is time between the disaster and recovery of systems. It means the amount of downtime which any company can afford. Lesser the downtime, better the recovery.

Backup

Backup is done on cloud during disaster to avoid loss of any data. For example, AWS Datasync service is used to securely transfer the data from on premise to AWS S3 or AWS EFS (Elastic File System). DataSync offers 10 times transfer speed as compared to other open sources. Whenever a server gets hit by disaster, DataSync comes to rescue.

Reliability

Cloud DR is totally reliable when it comes to fast recovery and security of data. As data is stored in the different servers, even if some servers get hit by a disaster, the others will back it up and the work will not stop. Thus, by providing reliable support, the cloud is helping us to focus on more productive things.

AWS SFTP(Secure File Transfer Protocol) is used to securely transfer the data into and out of S3. SFTP is user friendly as it does not require any special infrastructure to operate.