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CLOUD DISASTER
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s cloud adoption grows, cloud computing

is becoming one of the most popular

enterprise options for disaster recovery.
This e-guide provides guidance for deciding if cloud DR is right for your business and how you can set up a
successful cloud DR strategy.

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CRAFTING A CLOUD DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN

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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 can
afford. 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 situations, 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?

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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?

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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 scanning
tools. Additionally, ensure your recovery site has updated antivirus and firewall
protection. If using third-party recovery, keep in mind that it may be multitenancy, so make sure your access controls are protected.

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CLOUD-BASED DISASTER RECOVERY SERVICE GRABS

SPOTLIGHT
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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 were

very 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 cloudbased 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 where

they 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 physically
shipping 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 than

onsite 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 DR

VM 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 be

performed without impacting the production application.

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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. Whatever

happens, 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

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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 copy
of 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 better
off 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

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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 important
considerations:
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 same
10 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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