No DR is the worst DR!

What does a disaster recovery strategy mean to you? Disaster recovery (DR) is defined as a subset of business continuity and involves a set of policies, tools and procedures to enable the recovery or continuation of vital technology infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster.

Does your business have a plan in place for DR in the Cloud? Exactly how prepared are you?

We sat down with industry expert Gleb Otochkin to discuss this topic and best practices. A question that people always ask is, ”I hear about disaster recovery all the time, what disasters are we guarding against? What am I preparing for?” According to Gleb, disasters can come in many forms and differing levels of disaster. It could be as simple as a problem with your local data center or as extreme as a natural disaster like Hurricane Sandy that took out all of the local data centers in New York City. As simple as it sounds, having a plan in place with site procedures, how to switch over, who is in charge, communications plans and next steps is key to keeping your business up and running.

In addition, all training processes, procedures and automation should be considered to try to minimize any human mistakes. Most cloud vendors have some automation already in place, AWS for example has RDS with different availability zones for your database. Speak with your cloud vendor to learn about your options.

If you don’t have a disaster recovery site and don’t want to deal with the cost or complexity of managing a remote data center, you may choose to set up your DR database in one of the public cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform or Oracle.

Many options and variations for DR exist. Understanding and preparing for some of the common scenarios, ranging from simple backup and restore to fault-tolerant,multi-site solutions will provide you will control and a solution in the event of a disaster.

If you would like to speak more about DR in the cloud, please reach out directly to Gleb Otochkin at [email protected]