I ran across an interesting, albeit brief article that discusses a recent IDC report on business continuity in the cloud. While words such as “nascent” and “untapped” appear in the article to describe business continuity in the cloud, we at TwinStrata have been busily making this a reality.
We regularly see a number of mid-size businesses that store all of their primary data at a single location, with perhaps tape backups or online backups stored off-site for disaster purposes. A looming question for many of these businesses is what happens if a disaster strikes resulting in data loss at a primary location and how quickly can business applications get back up and running. If the answer is days to weeks, as experienced recently by the state of Virginia, the business may suffer significant monetary losses, irrepairable harm or even effectively close.
Disaster planning can often help IT administrators mitigate the risk of long outages by quantifying Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), or how long it takes to get application back up and running before disaster strikes. It also help quantify Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs), representing the amount of data loss that can be tolerated often measured in time. Disaster planning can also highlight the perils of typical off-site data protection, such as:
1) the fact that tape backups fail 60% of the time on average, but are rarely checked, resulting in rolling back to much older copies of data than anticipated (or none at all)
2) the fact that there is significant time required to go from a tape to restored data and running applications
3) the fact that it may take days to restore an online backup over the network
So what can be done aside from setting up a standby recovery site with dedicated hardware and infrastructure, often at prohibitive cost?
Moving your backups to the cloud is a good first step. It avoids the issues of tape altogether, making it easier to spot check backups to ensure they are correct and consistent. With products such as CloudArray that offer a virtual appliance that runs in the cloud (that may be used in tandem with your virtual or physical appliance on premise), it means your data can be recovered rapidly from a cloud compute site local to your cloud storage provider. Finally, it opens the possibility of standing up your applications in the cloud as part of a full business continuity solution. Think about an off-site business continuity strategy with on-demand compute and storage resources. The future may be a lot closer than you think…
Stay tuned as we’ll have a lot more to say on this topic in upcoming posts.
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