Your Cloud won't be covered without disaster recovery
Disaster recovery has a major role in protecting 'business as usual' when unforeseen circumstances arise, but the vital process is often overlooked until it is too late when it comes to managing IT infrastructure, claims David Leyland, head of UK Services, GlassHouse Technologies
Applications and information must be protected by adequate business-aligned disaster recovery (DR) strategies and this alignment can be even more important when businesses outsource their data storage and adopt cloud services.
How Much Protection do You Need?
When determining the correct disaster recovery (DR) strategy, organisations should capture what assets they have, the external and internal risks they need to be protected from, and how to maintain the accuracy of those assets. A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) will identify how much downtime can be afforded and establish a minimum requirement for protection. Finding the balance between the impact versus cost is one of the biggest challenges facing organisations when implementing and maintaining DR capability. DR is often thought of as a little 'old hat' and it has been some time since the IT crowd got excited about it. What they are excited about is 'the cloud' – a hotly discussed and debated technology.
What's Your Cloud Providers DR Strategy?
Some suggest cloud storage solutions enable data to be made available any time, any place, regardless of where the critical failure happened and, therefore, assist in reducing downtime when a disaster occurs. However, cloud services can provoke many questions about DR because when handing over its data to a third party, a business is at the mercy of the DR strategy that the provider has in place.
When considering transitioning into the cloud, the IT manager should check all the processes offered by the provider align with the service level agreements (SLAs) and business needs of the company, conforming to the BIA.
If any third party is involved in a business's transition into the cloud, it's important to ensure the infrastructure functions deliver the appropriate levels of security, performance and availability. Due diligence must be performed on any supplier to ensure they are suitable. Reliability of potential cloud partners should be thoroughly investigated to assess if they meet the existing standards. For example, some businesses will benefit from a more robust security protection and DR measures with their new hosted model, while others will feel security is not comparable with their own stringent benchmarks.
When the business' SLAs are met by the provider, there may be significant benefits to adopting the cloud as IT departments no longer have the capital and operational burdens of running DR sites and can pay a standard monthly fee for their DR strategy.
DR is the 'insurance' package for the IT department and it's paramount to get it right whether the business houses all its storage within the company or relies upon a third party provider. I believe the cloud can provide a cost effective, efficient DR model for some businesses but planning and measuring to ensure the balance between downtime versus the level of protection is fundamental to a safe, secure IT department able to avert disaster.
