Being able to promptly respond to any outage of your network is a key part of any Disaster Recovery plan. A good DR plan helps minimize the effects of outages on your organization’s bottom line. There is a lot of variabilities that go into those DR plans and how exactly they are implemented. Some recovery plans can be costly, like recreating a whole backup data center to house your data. But unless your organization is large and has millions of dollars to spend on that, it’s not a viable option. An option that is viable for all organization big and small are cloud-based services. Services like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure are all platforms that allow you to execute these DR plans. All three allow you to prepare for these disasters, but each goes about it differently.
If we are going to talk about DR plans there some terms you are going to need to know. The first is the Recovery Time Objective or RTO. RTO is the maximum acceptable length of time that your application or network can be offline. How long you are willing to be down for recovery this will depend on your service level agreement that you set. Next is Recovery Point Objective or RPO. RPO is the maximum acceptable length of time during which data can be lost. This is at max how long should it take before data starts to disappear or is overwritten due to an outage. This is not your data disappearing this is more application based like an online store. Customer information data which only stays around for a few minutes before being stored or discarded.
Now that we know some key phrases that are commonly used and what we want to do why do we want to? Without a DR plan when you do have an outage your recovery time will be slow, and your services will be out for a while. This could be catastrophic if your organization relies heavily on an online store the whole time you are recovering you are losing sales. This affects your bottom line and could force you to scale back for a while. For other organizations, this could mean that your employees no longer have access to your network or maybe some of the other critical applications they use. You lose productivity and sales while they just wait for it all to come back. We know the phrase, what we want to do, and why we want to do it so let’s look at how we can.
Google Cloud does not provide you with a single plug and play way to implement a disaster recovery plan. It inside provides you with all the tools that you would need to create your DR plan. Google Cloud allows you to leverage Google infrastructure to implement your DR plan. It lets you create that back data base and the google cloud website provides you with all the documentation that you need to create your own DR plan from scratch. This lets you customize your DR plan for exactly what you have and optimize your results. Google cloud provides high capacity, security, Network infrastructure, tech support, physical facilities, and even was of planning for peak bandwidth load.
AWS also provides DR through its CloudEndure disaster recovery. CloudEndure is a service that helps you quickly and easily shift your disaster recovery to the AWS cloud. It is a fast and lightweight service for implementing your DR plan. CloudEndure reduces its load on your system by not using snapshot systems that take a snapshot of your infrastructure and infrequent interval. Instead, it uses Continuous Data Protection.
CloudEndure implements a compute and storage system, that keeps a synced set of data. With this strategy, you don’t have to pay for the whole duplicate storage of your site. You only pay for the whole compute and storage infrastructure when you need to use it. It supports physical, virtual, and cloud-based source infrastructure and databases such as MS SQL, Oracle, and My SQL. CloudEndure minimizes its load on your infrastructure by running in the background. It also uses Continuous Data Protection that runs on memory instead of saving to disk somewhere than having read and write. Here is an example of a case study on one company’s DR plan.
Azure allows you to have at DR plan but goes about it differently than the other two. Azure lets you have a DR plan by using its partners who specialize in back up and recovery to create your plan or use prebuilt solutions. The partners would create your recovery plan by analyzing what your organization’s needs are and build a solution. Conversely, you could use one of the prebuilt DR plans available on the Azure market. These plans come from vendors such as Veeam, Veritas, and Zerto. Here is an example of a DR plan that is built with azure for and SMB.
Powerland has an array of services that include managed hosted service and can even help you set up your cloud solution. Or if you have already set up some cloud-based services and would like to know about what more you could be doing feel free to contact us. Contact us by using the form found at the bottom of the page or send us an email at inquiry@powerland.ca. We will connect you with our friendly and knowledgeable staff that can help you.
