The best and secure way to store your organization’s data is to store the data in the cloud environment. Most organizations are currently using cloud computing services. What if the hardware fails at the end of the cloud service providers where your data is stored? The answer is pretty simple. A cloud disaster recovery system will help you in such kind of situation.

What is cloud disaster recovery?

The CDR (Cloud disaster recovery) is the system or process that enables you to retrieve your data in critical conditions. It is very hard to retrieve the data from your in-house hardware after the cloud disaster. So, the cloud service providers take the backup for every data and are prepared for the disaster. When any disaster occurs, they provide fully functional remote access to the client on another remote virtual server.

Why cloud disaster recovery is important for your business?

Can you predict when cloud disasters occur? Well, no one can predict such kind of critical condition because it happens due to several reasons. So, we should be prepared to handle such kinds of situations.

To run your online business smoothly, you must have protocols for data recovery in critical conditions. If you have valid disaster recovery protocols for your organization, your customer needs to face very little downtime. Also, you will get more throughput for your online business.

The minimal downtime and maximum throughput can increase your revenue and customer satisfaction for your business. These types of things can help you to maximize the performance of your business.

If you make proper protocols for the disaster recovery, you can define the delay for the data recovery. Furthermore, you can notify your customers that we will get back with your data in some amount of time such as within 4 to 5 hours.

Unknown examples of the cloud disaster

We have explained here some real-life examples of cloud disasters.

AWS Power Outage

There is some issue that occurs in the electric infrastructure of the AWS due to heavy Strome in Sydney. Due to that AWS had faced a power outage for more than 10 hours.

In this critical condition, every website which is hosted on the AWS and was getting heavy traffic had to face downtime for 10 hours. Several businesses were affected by the power outage of AWS in 2016. This example shows how bad weather condition affects the cloud environment.

MS Office 365 DNS failure

Just after a few months of launching the Microsoft office 365 productivity suite, it is crashed. At that time, Microsoft was facing global outages due to DNS Server failure or falling into the trash.

From this example, we can know that cloud disasters can occur due to any kind of problems such as hardware problems, technical problems, or power outages.

Google doc’s downtime

Google doc is useful to share information between groups of people. It provides the public cloud environment to upload your data.

In the last recent years, Google faced an outage for a continuous hour due to word processor failure in the UK. As many businesses use this productive tool, they can’t able to share information for an hour.

In 2021, Facebook and WhatsApp have also faced downtime for 45 minutes due to server issues. So, there are many examples of the cloud disaster, and for that people or organizations have faced serious problems.

Also read:- Cloud App security: preventions developers must know

Types of the cloud disasters

There are some types of cloud disasters due to that your business can face critical issues.

Technical disaster: If anything wrong happens with the cloud technology, there is a chance to happen a cloud disaster. For example, if hardware fails, a power outage occurs, server or DNS fails, big cloud disaster can happen.

Human Disaster: Any human is not perfect. So, an imperfect one can make a mistake. If a human makes a misconfiguration error, debugging error, or any other kind of error that affects the whole system can lead to a critical issue. Furthermore, malicious third-party access is also one reason for the cloud disaster.

Natural disaster: The cloud system fails due to the natural disaster rarely. As we have given an example of the AWS in the above section, heavy rain, Strom, or earthquake can disrupt cloud infrastructure, and you may need to face the outage or downtime.

Methods for the cloud disaster recovery

We need such types of cloud disaster recovery methods so that we can project every app’s data and precious information. Here, we have explained some methods which fulfill every customer’s requirement.

Backup and restore

This is the simplest way to recover your data from any critical condition. The cloud service providers only need to make a simple backup of the data at the different geographical locations. So, if any single server crashes, they can redirect the whole traffic of the apps to other servers and your online business have always uptime.

There are different types of backup such as full backup, Incremental backup, mirror backup, and differential backup. The main advantage to use this method is that it doesn’t contain any malicious or old files. So, it keeps clean to your data. Furthermore, there is a chance that files can be deleted accidentally from the backup server due to several reasons. So, the Backup and restore method has its advantages and disadvantages.

Warm disaster recovery

The meaning of warm disaster recovery is that you have a standby server at different locations. If your main server fails due to some disaster, you can redirect the whole traffic to the standby server and it can handle the whole load of the application.

Multi-site deployment

Multi-site deployment is the best and expensive solution for cloud disaster recovery. In this method, we are running the single application or website on multiple regional servers. If any out of all regional servers fails, other servers can handle the load. In this case, every region contains multiple servers so it is much expensive.

Also read: What is load balancing in cloud computing?

Pilot light

The pilot light method allows you to replicate only required data from one region to another region. So, you don’t need to transfer the whole data and workload to another region. You can transfer a small part of your IT infrastructure which is minimal to run your application.

Benefits of the cloud disaster recovery

The cloud-based disaster recovery system makes your system flexible and increases the uptime for it. It allows users to restore data quickly from any location. So, your online business can come online again in no time when any crucial incident occurs.

Also, it increases your customer’s trust. If your customer faces more downtime on your application, they can choose another online business platform. Due to this your revenue decreases and you are going to lose your regular customers.

It is simple and efficient to apply a cloud disaster recovery system to every location. After that, you can easily access the data remotely from any location. Also, every disaster recovery service provider allows you to test the disaster recovery system so that you can make sure that it is fully working.

Also, it is cost-effective. Users need to pay as much as they use it. There are several other benefits to using the cloud disaster recovery system.

Also read: What is distributed cloud? What are its benefits?

Cloud disaster recovery service providers

There are several cloud disaster recovery providers available in the market. Some of the vendors provide disaster recovery systems with their cloud services such as public cloud service providers.

Microsoft Azure provides the Azure site healing facility for disaster recovery. Google cloud platform (GCP) provides alternative cloud storage to protect your data from disaster. If you are using the web services of the Amazon web services (AWS), you can use the Cloudendure disaster recovery facility to recover your data.

There are some top vendors available who provide Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). You can get more information about the below vendors on the internet.

• Recovery Point Systems
• Sungard AS
• Expedient
• Bluelock
• TierPoint
• IBM DRaaS

Also, users can choose any vendor who provides the backup services, and backup all data there. After, they need to recover the data from the backup server when a disaster occurs at the main server location.

Conclusion

Every business owner should make the protocols for the data disaster. So, they can quickly cover up their whole data and make their business online in minimal time. However, it doesn’t matter which method they are using for the recovery system. If they are using the public cloud service, either they can use recovery systems provided by the same vendor or can buy from another vendor.

This article concludes that even if you are running a small business, you must have a data backup or data recovery system.

Also read: What is cloud supercomputing?