10 Secrets for Successful Disaster Recovery in the Cloud StoryBoard

Your Challenge

The pay-per-use pricing structure of cloud services make it a cheaper DR option, but there are gotchas you need to avoid, ranging from unexpected licensing costs to potential security vulnerabilities.
You likely started on the path to cloud DR with consideration of cloud storage for offsite retention of backups. Systems recovery in the cloud can be a real value-add to using cloud as a backup target.
Your cloud-based DR environment has to be secure and compliant, but performance also has to be “good enough” to operate the business.
Location still matters, and selecting the DR site that optimizes latency tolerance and geo-redundancy can be difficult.

Our advice

Critical Insight

Keep your systems dormant until disaster strikes. Prepare as much of your environment as possible without tapping into compute resources. Enjoy the low at-rest costs, and leverage the reliability of the cloud in your failover.
Avoid failure on the failback! Bringing up your systems in the cloud is a great temporary solution, but an expensive long-term strategy. Make sure you have a plan to get back on premises.
Leverage cloud DR as a start for cloud migration. Cloud DR provides a gateway for broader infrastructure lift and shift to cloud IaaS, but this should only be the first phase of a longer-term roadmap that ends in multi-service hybrid cloud.

Impact and Result

Calculate the cost of your DR solution with a cloud vendor. Test your systems often to build out more accurate budgets and to define failover and failback action plans to increase confidence in your capabilities.
Define “good enough” performance by consulting with the business and setting correct expectations for the recovery state.
Dig deeper into the various flavors of cloud-based DR beyond backup and restore, including pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site recovery. Each of these has unique benefits and challenges when done in the cloud.