As mentioned in Part I of this series, cloud technology has introduced a viable alternative to the practice of creating secondary sites for disaster recovery (DR), promising to save IT organizations hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in infrastructure and maintenance. While the cost reduction associated with replacing dedicated DR infrastructure is intuitive, the ability of cloud solutions to meet the recovery times (RTOs and RPOs) dictated by businesses is often less well understood.
Part I suggested two key considerations in recovering IT operations from a disaster are (1) regaining access to data and (2) regaining access to applications. Today’s cloud integrated storage or cloud storage gateways can push backups or live data sets to the cloud easily and securely, enabling the first element of a cloud DR solution. With this in mind, let’s examine two strategies for application recovery using cloud-based DR:Realizing an economical alternative to traditional DR