Cloud infrastructure can be used for disaster recovery. Check out whether your DR plan can be implemented with the tools and services offered by Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft.
AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform devices for disaster recovery
Several IT administrators went into 2020 calling for better disaster recovery to mitigate damage from the unexpected. Pandemics and economic shutdowns would bring those concerns much more into focus, according to their knowledge.
Many companies have reconsidered their disaster recovery (DR) systems after the Coronavirus outbreak. While organizations accelerated their adoption of public cloud resources, workers moved to remote work. The convergence of these two trends has likely led to more enterprises evaluating disaster recovery options on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and other public clouds.
An overview of disaster recovery on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform
Public cloud IaaS reduces costs and simplifies the DR process through the use of on-demand cloud resources, compared to traditional approaches. Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) systems automatically launch applications if the primary hosting site fails by starting the necessary cloud infrastructure, installing application pictures, and connecting databases and volumes.
After a primary cloud site returns online, the DRaaS software synchronizes data from the remote area, restart apps at the primary site, and decommissions virtual infrastructure at the secondary cloud site.
Many of the major hyperscale cloud providers entered the DRaaS market late. The company initially provided cloud infrastructure and APIs to disaster recovery SMEs but has since branched out into other services. However, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft have developed cutting-edge products since then. Despite this, Google still provides only documentation on how to build DIY, cloud-based disaster recovery, rather than an undeniable DRaaS service.
It is necessary to work with third-party technology and DR management specialists to systematically meet those critical objectives when choosing Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). Nevertheless, the question remains: how do you choose that partner? What would be a good combination of factors and features for you? Is there a DRaaS solution that is right for you according to your business needs?
DRaaS: A Step-by-Step Guide
As a result of DRaaS, on-premises environments and cloud environments can failover and failback as needed.
Data recovery on-premises and uncovered metal server recovery are undeniably only a few of the features of failover. It can take many hours to restore complete applications in this manner, depending on the scale of the disaster. You can ensure RPO and RTO by spinning up priority applications in the cloud.
Cloud-based DRaaS continuously replicates pictures based on virtual machines. Application processing is moved to the cloud automatically or manually during a disaster incident. DRaaS is also responsible for AD verification to cloud servers, and for maintaining secure connections between end-users and cloud servers.
Following a site restoration, or after a secondary location is created, the services failback the applications, configurations, and data. Additionally, it surrenders client verification to the on-premises system. This ensures the smooth running of your business, and in controlled industries ensures you don’t cross paths with compliance guidelines.
DRaaS is, in any case, a challenging process. Suppose, for instance, that you had an application that is divided across multiple virtual servers and had its front end connected to a database that ran in the cloud. This includes strict priorities for level restoration.
Additionally, the connection of end-users is validated and completed promptly. Disaster recovery is not a task that IT can easily prepare for during a disaster. However, DRaaS was designed specifically to handle that kind of assignment.
Cloud-based Infrastructure: DRaaS Tools:
As DRaaS is a cloud-based infrastructure, many companies will first try it for cloud-based disaster recovery. They’ll be surprised to find this.
- AWS
CloudEndure, whose products currently include AWS’ cloud-based disaster recovery and workload migration contributions, filled a gap in AWS’ portfolio with its acquisition in 2019. In addition to replication from on-premises environments or other IaaS cloud environments to AWS, CloudEndure DR agents can replicate workloads across AWS regions. The document provides:
Data replication without interruption;
- An area where workloads can be organized using just enough compute and storage resources from Amazon Web Services;
- Automated conversion from local format to AWS event and picture formats;
- Backing for popular enterprise software, operating systems, and cloud environments, including Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and OpenStack;
- A point-in-time recovery capability, namely the ability to restore either the current or an earlier state of an application; and
- DR testing without interrupting operations.
Administrators can also use VMware Site Recovery Manager with vSphere Replication to implement AWS as a disaster recovery solution on-premises. Site Recovery Manager DR is equivalent to using a secondary private data farm since VMware Cloud on AWS runs the local VMware programming stack.
- Microsoft Azure
Microsoft reinforced its DRaaS offering with an acquisition, just like Amazon. Even so, it was foresighted enough to do so when it combined the business continuity technology from InMage with Azure Site Recovery in 2014.
Administrators can replicate applications from on-premises systems running on Azure Stack or another virtualization platform. AWS Windows events can also be transferred to Azure as part of Site Recovery using Azure cloud regions. With CloudEndure, you can capture VM events on-demand during recovery incidents, perform non-disruptive DR tests, and set personalized targets for recovery points and recovery times.
For complex data recovery scenarios, Azure Automation or PowerShell scripts can be used as part of your customized recovery plan. A Site Recovery plan can use these as a component, which determines when machines need to fail over and restart to support applications with many dependencies.
- Google Cloud
Packaged DRaaS is not available through Google Cloud. On the whole, it provides documentation on cloud-based disaster recovery planning as well as how to use Google Cloud Platform as a disaster recovery platform. Apart from its IaaS products, Google’s documentation focuses on different automation tools to eliminate manual DR processes when replicating and failing over from an external environment. Several GCP services can be helpful to DIY DR:
- Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Status Dashboard for monitoring and analyzing applications, metrics, and incidents;
- Using Cloud Deployment Manager, GCP environments can be automatically created based on predefined formats;
- Infrastructure templating and setup management tools with GCP support, such as Ansible, Chef, and Terraform.
- As part of its partner catalog, GCP has a list of a few organizations that provide Disaster Recovery Infrastructure as a Service or managed disaster recovery services.
Don’t buy rebranded products for data security
In Gartner’s definition of DRaaS, the following are the primary features of a managed oversaw DR service:
- Collection and replication of server and application pictures to cloud infrastructure;
- Synchronizing data with cloud platforms and database services;
- Automated disaster recovery runbooks creation and management;
- The provisioning of cloud resources, including IaaS servers, storage, and networks, to rehydrate an application;
- Utilization of previously collected resources for automatic server recovery;
- Having automatic fallbacks after events have been resolved; and
- Application recovery time, performance, and other KPIs are measured according to predetermined SLAs.
In addition to data backup and cloud infrastructure, cloud-based disaster recovery services have other attributes. More to the point, as Gartner points out, some vendors miscategorized and mass-market tools as DRaaS although they only provide part of the necessary components, like data replication and IT infrastructure orchestration software.
Complicated disaster recovery tools are one of the reasons why this market remains fragmented.
Alternative CSPs and choice considerations
However, IBM Cloud’s DRaaS solution does not offer a complete application backup/migration/replication solution, though it does collaborate with Veeam and Zerto to provide the functionality. DRaaS and Resiliency Orchestration Services are business continuity products IBM Global Services offers DRaaS for client-managed configuration and recovery and Resiliency Orchestration Services managed by IBM.
All things considered, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) does not offer a DRaaS product. In addition, it provides documentation for using Data Guard, a high-availability, disaster recovery, and data security software for Oracle databases with OCI.
In case your company already uses AWS, Azure, or GCP as its primary public cloud service, those platforms should be able to meet your cloud-based disaster recovery needs. Consider some third-party options if your complex systems span more than one cloud or on-premises system. You should also look beyond the hyperscale providers if you have distributed systems.
