Disaster Recovery Management (DRM) in the Cloud

Although the occurrence of a disaster is unexpected over a certain time span of a system, the possibility of it occurring cannot be ignored. Automatic Disaster recovery in the Cloud becomes a largely indistinguishable operation if your entire Cloud infrastructure falls apart. You should have the capabilities in place to restore it on internal servers, at a managed hosting services provider, or at another Cloud provider within minutes or hours.

Through disaster recovery planning, you identify an acceptable recovery state and develop processes & procedures to achieve the recovery state in the event of a disaster.

Defining a disaster recovery plan involves two key metrics:

1. Recovery Point

2. Recovery Time

Recovery Point determines how much data are you ready to lose in number of hours or days of data. At the same time, Recovery Time determines how much downtime is acceptable and is specified as number of hours/days to get things fully operational once again.

DRM plan in the Cloud should consider these four major factors before going in effect;

1. Backup and data recovery (fast, secure, easy)

2. Geographical presence of data center (redundancy of data center according to geographical presence)

3. Recovery Time and Point ( should be ~0 hours if possible )

4. Monitoring tools residing in third cloud service provider’s infrastructure (as monitoring systems cannot live in either your primary or secondary cloud provider’s infrastructure)

WOLF has a DRM plan which expects zero downtime and data loss by having multiple data centers in different geographic locations that are synchronized. In other words, we are operating with multiple data centers from different infrastructure providers with dedicated, high-bandwidth connections serving different geographical customers. 

Though the cold reality is that the cost of losing 24 hours of data is less than the cost of maintaining a zero downtime/zero loss of data infrastructure, we still try to emphasize this level of redundancy in our DRM plan, which gives our customers 99.96% service availability and zero loss of data. 

We have implemented a strict backup recovery management plan for all the applications- design and encrypted data - with a daily on-site backup on different data center. WOLF application designers can also take a backup of the design & data at anytime with the click of a button! Thus we guarantee zero data loss with maximum downtime of approx. 2 hours as per our DRM plan.

With the acceptability of the Cloud and related services increasing daily, the DRM plan could become a point of competitive difference between vendors in the Cloud.