Article by Claude Calleja Executive at eSkills Malta Foundation

More and more companies of all sizes are moving to the cloud, but why is it time to move Disaster Recovery systems to the cloud?   

Partnering with a provider that meets their disaster-recovery needs will allow organisations to protect themselves from threats such as system failures and focus on growing their business rather than addressing unknown risk factors. One of the benefits of using disaster recovery as a service is that one does not have to invest money and resources in owning and maintaining a disaster recovery environment on the ground. It may be tempting to implement every step of a disaster rescue plan in-house, but smaller companies that lack a dedicated IT team may find it easier to use a third-party solution.

Cloud computing is cheap because of its economy of scale, and outsourced tasks usually gives one exactly what they need. The plot thickens for companies that use software as a service (SaaS) provider, which in turn relies on third-party cloud providers to host their services.

There are also several smaller, lesser-known players who focus much of their efforts on providing high quality Disaster Recovery Services (DRaaS), but there is a shortage of them either. A single point disaster can weaken one’s business, and a backup and logging service is extremely important if one needs to perform disaster recovery after a failure and see where something went wrong. DRAAS can be a great option for small and medium-sized enterprises that lack the expertise to test an effective disaster and recovery plan. Proper management of the location and nature of the backups, as well as the availability of backup data, can cause a single point of failure or disaster that can weaken the company.

A disaster can also affect a wide geographical area, which means that backups can be affected even if they are in the same region as the main office.

If one wants to use the cloud for DR / BC planning, there are some problems they need to face. For disaster recovery, this means how critical business applications behave in a cloud environment. If one relies on cloud disaster and recovery software, they also need to examine the specifics of what they are buying. These tests not only help to know whether the disaster recovery plan is working but can also help in gaining insight into problems that can occur during a disaster.

The eSkills Malta Foundations hopes that this discussion will hopefully clear up the misconception that one does not have to worry about resilience and recovery when one deploys their workloads in the cloud.   

While such services exist, there is certainly much more to consider before an organisation can be considered safe. It is important to note that while cloud providers have certain responsibilities, companies and cloud customers are responsible for planning an effective disaster recovery strategy. One probably has a plan to protect their company data, employees and businesses. Management will feel safer knowing that one knows the risks and has adapted their disaster and recovery plan accordingly.

This is one of the main reasons why an emergency rescue plan is needed for both cloud services and in-house services, as well as cloud providers and cloud customers.