In today’s increasingly complex IT world, an automated disaster recovery plan is not optional, it's a strategic necessity. Comprehensive and automated IT disaster recovery plans take the first step of bringing order to the chaos and complexity. However, the specific elements and considerations for each plan vary significantly depending on whether your IT infrastructure is primarily on-premises, in a cloud environment, or a hybrid of the two.
This article overviews the challenges and benefits of a cloud disaster recovery strategy, how on-premises and hybrid approaches compare, and how runbook automation can help.
The different disaster recovery models
Detailed recovery strategies and procedures include defining clear steps for restoring applications and systems after a disaster, and outlining recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). Here are some key differences between the various infrastructure options:
- On premises: Often involves legacy data backup systems, redundant hardware, and physical failover sites.
- Cloud: Leverages cloud native environments and services like replication, snapshots, and automated failover to different availability zones or regions.
- Hybrid: Requires a coordinated approach, potentially involving both on-premises and cloud-based disaster recovery mechanisms; resulting in complex interdependencies.
On Prem disaster recovery (DR): Traditional approach and challenges
The choice between on-premises, cloud native environments, or hybrid disaster recovery significantly impacts implementation and outcomes. On-premises disaster recovery, while offering greater control over the physical infrastructure and direct management of data backups, presents several challenges that organizations must carefully consider:
- Higher Capital Expenditures (CapEx): Establishing an on-premises DR site necessitates significant upfront investments. This includes purchasing duplicate hardware (servers, storage, networking equipment), securing a physical location (potentially a secondary data center), and the initial setup costs for power, cooling, and security infrastructure. These large initial costs can be a substantial barrier to entry.
- Potentially Longer Recovery Times Due to the Physical Nature of Infrastructure: In the event of a disaster, restoring services from an on-premises disaster recovery site can take longer compared to cloud-based disaster recovery solutions. This is because physical hardware may need to be powered on, configured, and data to be restored, which are inherently time-consuming processes.
- Limited Scalability and Flexibility: Scaling an on-premises disaster recovery environment to accommodate growing data and application needs requires forecasting and further capital investments in hardware. This can be inflexible and lead to either over-provisioning (wasting resources) or under-provisioning (impacting recovery capabilities during a large-scale event).
- Physical Location Dependencies: An on-premises disaster recovery site is tied to a specific geographical location. If the disaster impacts a wide area, both the primary and DR sites could potentially be affected, defeating the purpose of the disaster recovery plan. Furthermore, managing and accessing a physically remote DR site can present logistical challenges.
- Complex Management and Maintenance: Maintaining an on-prem disaster recovery DR environment requires dedicated IT staff with specialized skills to manage the hardware, software, backups, and networking infrastructure at both the primary and secondary sites. Regular maintenance, patching, and upgrades add to the ongoing operational burden and costs.
- Data Backup and Restoration Challenges: Implementing robust data backup and restoration strategies in an on-premises environment can be intricate. This involves selecting appropriate backup technologies, scheduling regular backups, managing backup media, and ensuring the integrity and recoverability of the backed-up data. Testing the restoration process regularly is crucial but can be disruptive and resource-intensive.
Cloud disaster recovery (DR): The modern scalable solution
Conversely, disaster recovery for applications in a cloud environment provides scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, which enables faster recovery through automated failover and resource provisioning. However, resilience is the shared responsibility between the cloud provider and customer.
For example, when customers choose infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), the cloud provider owns the resilience and security of the infrastructure (hardware, software, and physical facility). You, the customer, are responsible for data and assets stored in the cloud environment including data, security, middleware and operating systems.
Cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) plans, where an organization relies entirely on cloud infrastructure for its recovery needs, offer numerous benefits but also come with their own set of challenges:
- Service Availability and Reliability: While cloud providers generally offer high availability, outages can still occur even in the cloud environment. Organizations need to carefully review the service level agreements (SLAs) of their cloud provider and understand the potential impact of any downtime on their recovery efforts.
- Complexity of Configuration and Management: Setting up and managing a cloud disaster recovery environment can be complex, requiring expertise in the chosen cloud platform's services for replication, failover, and recovery. Automating these processes is essential but requires careful configuration.
- Testing and Validation: Testing a cloud DR plan requires simulating disaster scenarios in the cloud environment. This can be complex and may incur costs for spun-up resources. Ensuring that the recovery processes work as expected and meet the required RTOs and RPOs is vital.
- Cost Optimization: While cloud can offer cost savings in the long run, managing and optimizing cloud DR costs is important. Organizations need to monitor their storage, compute, and network usage to avoid unexpected expenses.
- Data Governance and Control: Organizations might have less direct control over their data in the cloud compared to on-premises infrastructure. Ensuring proper data governance, retention policies, and access controls are in place is essential.
Addressing these challenges requires careful planning, thorough testing, a strong understanding of cloud services, and a well-defined governance framework to ensure a successful cloud-based disaster recovery strategy.
Consider cloud disaster recovery best practices to learn more about the fundamentals.
Hybrid disaster recovery (DR): The bridge between legacy and cloud
Similar to cloud disaster recovery, hybrid disaster recovery is a more balanced approach, combining the benefits of both on-premises and cloud environments. Hybrid disaster recovery (DR) plans, which combine on-premises infrastructure with cloud-based resources for recovery, offer flexibility and cost-effectiveness but also present unique challenges. Here are some of the key challenges:
- Complexity of Management: Managing a hybrid environment inherently adds complexity. Coordinating recovery processes, infrastructure, and data across different environments (on-premises and cloud) can be difficult. This includes managing different consoles, tools, and skill sets.
- Network Connectivity and Bandwidth: Reliable and sufficient network bandwidth is crucial for replicating data and failing over applications to the cloud. Latency and bandwidth limitations can significantly impact recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). Ensuring secure and stable connectivity between on-premises and cloud environments can also be a challenge.
- Data Consistency and Synchronization: Maintaining data consistency between on-premises and cloud environments is critical. Ensuring that data is synchronized correctly and that transactional integrity is preserved during failover and failback can be complex, especially with large and frequently changing datasets.
- Cost Management: While hybrid DR can be cost-effective, managing costs effectively is essential. Unexpected egress charges, storage costs, and the need for specific cloud resources during a disaster can lead to budget overruns if not properly planned and monitored.
- Testing and Validation: Regularly testing the hybrid disaster recovery plan is crucial to ensure its effectiveness. However, testing can be more complex in a hybrid environment, requiring coordination between on-premises and cloud systems. Full-scale disaster recovery drills can be disruptive and costly.
- Application Compatibility: Not all on-premises applications may be easily migrated or compatible with the cloud environment. Compatibility issues may require application modifications, re-architecting, or selecting different cloud services, adding time and complexity to the DR plan.
- Skill Gaps: Implementing and managing a hybrid DR solution requires a team with diverse skills, including expertise in both on-premises infrastructure and cloud technologies. Organizations may face challenges in finding or training personnel with the necessary skills.
- Regulatory Compliance: Certain industries have strict regulatory requirements regarding data sovereignty and disaster recovery. Ensuring compliance across a hybrid environment can be challenging and may require specific configurations and controls.
Disaster recovery automation: Enhancing efficiency and reliability
IT DR automation helps save time, reduce risk and increase efficiency and productivity across the entire IT estate. It streamlines and accelerates the standardization and consistency of recovery processes while simultaneously reducing the risk of human error. Automation for DR can be used to:
- Update recovery status tickets in an ITSM platform
- Provision or replicate infrastructure for failover or standby environments
- Report on post-event metrics and auto-generate regulatory audit logs
- Share recovery procedure updates via mass communications to resilience, risk and cloud operations teams and senior stakeholders
Ensuring disaster recovery consistency with effective testing
Consistency is key. To ensure your IT disaster recovery plans can effectively stand up to a real disaster event, frequent testing is required. Each application recovery plan should be tested at a minimum of once per year. Conducting simulation tests and failover drills that mimic real-life disaster scenarios on a regular basis provide the best way to ensure plan effectiveness. Testing provides a way to pinpoint any points of failure in the process, ensure dependencies are accurately mapped, and make adjustments to the plan before a real recovery is required.
Cutover DR: A key enabler of disaster recovery consistency
As mentioned, a well-defined and regularly tested application recovery or failover plan is essential for all organizations. Understanding the nuances of on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments is critical for creating a plan that effectively minimizes downtime and data loss in the face of any disaster.
Cutover Recover’s AI-powered automated runbooks can help organizations navigate the complexities of modern IT environments and achieve true application resilience. Regardless of your IT infrastructure setup or disaster recovery strategy, Cutover Recover can help you increase efficiency, reduce risk and recover 50% faster.
When dealing with on-premises, cloud environments, or hybrid, Cutover Recover’s automated runbooks provide:
- Standardization and consistency across your entire IT estate with pre-defined runbook templates supporting multiple strategies
- A task-based approach to DR execution
- Calculations for key recovery metrics including recovery time objective (RTO) and auto-generated recovery time actuals (RTA)
- Automation of manual, repetitive tasks through the open API and integrations
- Dashboards and real-time reporting to keep stakeholders informed and streamline regulatory reporting
- AI-powered runbooks that summarize and validate runbook content, generate runbooks from third party data sources, and improve runbooks with AI driven suggestions.
Learn how Cutover can help you with consistency and standardization of IT disaster recovery execution, book a demo today.