best practices cloud recovery

7/27/2019 Best Practices Cloud Recovery

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White Paper SerieBEST PRACTICES FORCLOUD-BASED RECOVERY


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Best Practices for Cloud-based Recovery2

CLOUD-BASED RECOVERY:

A NEW WAY TO SOLVE AN OLD PROBLEM

Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) has been available

or some time, and has leveraged a number

o inrastructure options and recovery platorms.

Many o these options have provided a recovery

solution that is exible, scalable, and secure.

And in some cases, service providers oer

ully managed solutions with the expertise

to support heterogeneous IT environments.


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The arrival o cloud computing ushers in a new platorm or RaaS. Application recovery

on cloud-based inrastructure oers the benefts o shared tenancy greater efciency

and lower cost combined with the aster recovery speed and improved scalability that

comes with virtualization.

For all the benefts o cloud, the undamentals o an eective recovery strategy dontchange, and remain essential:

Applications expertise is still required to restore complex environments without delay

and added downtime. Beore selecting a recovery solution, organizations still must analyze

the value o their applications and the impact that application downtime would have on

their business. Once those applications are analyzed, the work o prioritizing them into

tiers based on their criticality remains important because it allows an IT organization to

prioritize its investments in recovery technology. Finally, in every organization, the need

to maintain and test recovery procedures is constant.

HOW DO YOU TAKE YOUR CLOUD?Cloud is notoriously difcult to defne because cloud capabilities are not black-and-white.

They all on a continuum between private and public, and between manually administered

virtual hosting and ully automated cloud.

Consequently, there are many ways to implement cloud-based recovery.

Determining the appropriate cloud implementation or your organization is a business decision

broadly based on two criteria: cost and security. The key is to look or ways to manage the

trade-os between the two. Greater security usually comes at greater cost, while a higher

degree o automation is oten tied to a more public cloud inrastructure.

Having the exibility to implement cloud in a way that matches your organizations specifc

business needs requires the ability to choose rom and blend multiple cloud and virtualtechnologies.


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NEVER COMPROMISE ON RELIABILITY

Regardless o your specifc cloud implementation the blend o technologies supporting

your application recovery the one thing that cannot be neglected is the reliability o the

recovery solution itsel. Any successul recovery, cloud-based or otherwise, has a number o

requirements:

Coherent data

Sufcient capacity

Available sta

Time or confguration, backups, and testing

Recovery expertise

Procedures that are both sufciently tested or eectiveness and kept current with changes

to the production environment

To ensure these requirements are met, many organizations opt to have their recovery ully

managed by an external service provider. When recovery is cloud-based, additional questions

that an organization must consider and be sure to ask their provider include:

Who owns the compute assets?

Who owns the responsibility or recovery?

Is there a Recovery Assurance associated with the service?

Because a service provider has the resources and expertise in place to manage the ull

recovery, it can (and should) assume ownership o managing the compute assets and

maintaining them to ensure the requirements or application recovery are met. In the best case

scenario, the service provider will be responsible or all o the steps in the recovery liecycle,including procedure planning, implementation, testing, and the recovery itsel.

When a service provider assumes responsibility or recovery, RTO and RPO requirements

can be backed by service level agreements (SLAs).


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THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF A RELIABLE CLOUD-BASED RECOVERY

Developing a reliable cloud-based recovery strategy calls or a tiered approach

to application availability.

The frst step is to perorm a business impact analysis. This exercise defnes which business

processes are most critical and most impacted by application downtime. Based on that

analysis, applications are prioritized and organized into tiers based on their sensitivity

to downtime. Each tier can then be defned by the recovery time and recovery point

requirements o the applications within it.

Modernized data movement technologies

Every data movement technology has an associated RTO/RPO, and these application tiers

present an opportunity to modernize data movement to meet the RTO and RPO requirements

o specifc applications. Selecting the right data movement technology or each tier is essential

or an organized, efcient and successul recovery. For example, traditional tape-based backup

delivers recovery anywhere rom two days to a whole week. For critical applications like e-mailand online order systems, that level o downtime could shutter many businesses or good. Online

technologies, on the other hand, can help get applications back online in a matter o hours.

Three categories o technology modernize data movement to best support the ull range

o application recovery requirements: server replication, storage replication, and vaulting.

Server replication is ideal or critical applications in environments with a smaller numbers o

servers. Storage replication is also a right solution or critical applications, and is best deployed

in environments with larger numbers o servers.Vaulting, also known as online backup and

recovery, eliminates the cost and delay o tape-based backup.

Selecting a service providerEach o these solutions can be deployed on the cloud. But the question remains:

What criteria should be applied when selecting a cloud-based service provider?

Lower cost and scalability are the undamental benefts o moving recovery to the cloud.

But or critical applications, the service provider should be selected based on security

and reliability.

Fully-managed recovery services backed by contractually-guaranteed RTO and RPO service

levels are the key to assuring application availability. Additionally, the ability to select rom

a ull range o technologies or moving data to the cloud will ensure applications are

restored in priority order. Finally, a ull range o inrastructure options including virtual,

private-to-public cloud, and hybrid eliminates overspending.


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FULLY-MANAGED CLOUD-BASED RECOVERY: A MODEL

Every IT applications environment has specifc recovery requirements. The ollowing model

illustrates how a ully managed solution applies a range o technologies to help ensure

recovery requirements are met in a way that ensures security, reliability, and cost-eectiveness.

Selecting the technology

With cloud-based recovery, once the business impact analysis is completed and tiers are

defned, applications and data can then protected on a shared, secure cloud using the most

appropriate data movement technology.

For the most critical applications, server replication or storage replication solutions are selected

or their ability to deliver recovery in less than our hours at a near-zero recovery point.

Server replication sotware encapsulates the OS, applications confgurations and applications

data, and replicates them as soon as changes are written to disk. Similarly, in bigger

environments utilizing storage replication, sotware deployed on the storage array

cost-eectively replicates large numbers o virtual machines (VMs).

Those applications that are less sensitive to downtime but no less critical to the business are

encrypted and stored in a secure osite location using vaulting technology or online backup

and recovery. Vaulted data can be restored to the last successul backup in less than 24 hours.

Handing over recovery responsibility

With a ully managed solution, the service provider is now responsible or the management

and maintenance o the ull recovery liecycle.

During normal operation, the service provider executes 24/7/365 monitoring and handles

monthly capacity tuning.

For testing, the service provider delivers recovery runbooks customized to your environment

and supplies end-user verifcation as part o the exercise. When the service providers sta

does the heavy liting required or recovery testing, it eases the burden on your IT sta

and can eliminate the travel and expenses normally associated with a test.

In the event o an outage, disaster, or other interruption, the service provider will recover

applications and data into VMs and promote those VMs as active systems.

Automating as many steps in the process as possible speeds the recovery and avoids human

errors and human dependencies. The replication technologies provide ready-to-operate

VMs and data standing by at the recovery site while the restoration and rebuilding o VMs

rom vaulted data takes place.

The service provider coordinates the recovery in concert with additional applications

on physical systems and legacy mainrame equipment, and reconnects business users

to the recovered applications and data. When the incident has passed, the production

environment is then returned to normal operations.


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Managing recovery eectively is complex.

A ully managed recovery solution removes the

burden o that complexity rom an IT organization.And when the recovery solution leverages

modernized data movement technologies and a

range o secure cloud and virtual inrastructures,

the advantages are signifcant: higher availability,

better perormance, and lower cost.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN A CLOUD-BASED RECOVERY SOLUTION

Fully-managed services

Service provider is responsible or ensuring recovery o applications.

Recovery backed by contractually-guaranteed service-level agreements (SLA)

SLA covers the RTO/RPO requirements o your applications

A full range of data movement capabilities

Ensures RTO/RPO match the business value o applications

Prevents overspending and under-protection

A full range of infrastructure options

Private to Public

Virtual to Cloud

Hybrid

Enterprise-class infrastructure

Actively managed and maintained

Ensures security and reliability


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