Cloud DR

Cloud disaster recovery is a service that enables the backup and recovery of remote machines on a cloud-based platform.

Cloud disaster recovery is primarily an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution that backs up designated system data on a remote offsite cloud server. It provides updated recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) in case of a disaster or system restore.

What Is Cloud Disaster Recovery?

There are multiple ways to implement a disaster recovery plan. One approach is to rely on on-premise infrastructure for backing up your workloads.

The method that provides you with the greatest flexibility and recovery speed, however, is a cloud backup and disaster recovery. A cloud disaster recovery plan is one that makes use of a public cloud — such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud Platform — to back up data, applications and other resources. Then, when disaster occurs, those resources can be restored from the cloud back to their original locations — whether those locations are on-premise infrastructure or the cloud.

Another way to describe cloud backup and disaster recovery is to call it offsite disaster recovery because your workloads are backed up to a remote site and can be recovered from there.

It’s important to note that a cloud disaster recovery plan can be used to back up and restore workloads that run on-premise as well as those hosted in the cloud. You don’t have to run your production systems in the cloud in order to take advantage of the cloud-based disaster recovery.

Why Use Cloud Disaster Recovery?

A cloud disaster recovery plan provides several key benefits, as compared to other types of disaster recovery strategies:

It is more scalable, since you can easily increase the amount of resources that you back up in the cloud by purchasing more cloud infrastructure capacity.

You can pay as you go. In other words, you pay for cloud disaster recovery infrastructure as you use it; there is no need to invest upfront in hardware or to pay for more infrastructure than you actually use at a given time.

Cloud-based disaster recovery makes it possible to leverage geographic redundancy features. This means that you can spread your backed-up resources across multiple geographic regions in order to maximize their availability, even if part of the cloud that you use fails.