Create a Right Sized Disaster Recovery Plan StoryBoard

Your Challenge

Any time a natural disaster or major IT outage occurs, it increases executive awareness and internal pressure to create a disaster recovery plan (DRP).
Traditional DRP templates are onerous and result in a lengthy, dense plan that might satisfy auditors but will not be effective in a crisis.
The myth that a DRP is only for major disasters leaves organizations vulnerable to more common incidents.
The growing use of outsourced infrastructure services has increased reliance on vendors to meet recovery timeline objectives.

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.