Types of Disaster Recovery Options for Cloud Hosting

Disaster recovery for cloud hosting is a service that maintains data copies of your enterprise in a high secure environment offsite. The service offers many benefits to enterprises and individuals with cost savings being the most apparent. The service is highly affordable, and it reduces the needed space for infrastructure in your enterprise, especially for IT related infrastructure. Cloud disaster recovery has made it possible for enterprises of any size to implement effective and cost friendly disaster averting mechanisms. Nevertheless, it is imperative to ensure the service that you choose is the best for your enterprise needs.

Basic Factors You Should Consider
The main issues that you should consider can be divided into two categories, provider’s issues and your issues. You should ensure the provider guarantees a secure transfer of data at all times and users are properly authenticated when accessing the service. You should also ensure the service provider meets all your legal requirements regarding personal data storage, security and sharing.

On your part, ensure that you have all the resources to facilitate Cloud data recovery. You should ensure the network and bandwidth capacity supports effective redirection of users to the cloud hosting. It is also essential to have the skills necessary to restore data in case a disaster strikes. It is beneficial to choose an option with easy restore steps and easy migration back to the original location once the disaster is mitigated.

Types of Disaster Recovery Options

· Managed applications and managed disaster recovery – Most enterprises are looking for a Cloud hosting service that combines both disaster recovery and primary production offered by a managed service provider. This option allows enterprises to enjoy all the benefits of Cloud hosting without having to manage their hosting in-house. However, before handing over the control, it is necessary to ensure the service provider can offer uninterrupted service. The popular applications that use this hosting model include email and customer relationship management, among other applications.

· Back up to and restore from the Cloud – In this option, data and applications are hosted in-house and are backed up to the hosting service with intention of being restored back to the hardware in case a disaster occurs. When contemplating this option, consider the issues that relate to backup and restore aspects. In most occasions, backup is easy and straightforward, but recovery is a bit challenging. This is because in most occasions the data to be restored is big while the bandwidth is limited. To address this difficulty, some providers restore data to disks and then send them to customers for local recovery.

· Back up to and restore to the Cloud – In this option, your enterprise data is stored on the Cloud instead of the on-premises infrastructure, running on copies of the original virtual machines that exist there. This option requires the presence of both Cloud computing resources and storage. You can undertake restoration with this option either continuously or when a disaster strikes. However, pre-staged restoration is necessary to ensure all your data is up to date.

· Replication to Virtual Machines in the Cloud – This option is recommended when restoring applications that require recovery point objectives, application awareness and aggressive recovery time. This option can be used to protect the production capability of both on-premises and Cloud instances. At the time of a declared disaster, your host can turn on all of your Cloud standby virtual machines, offering you offsite access to an environment that mimics what was at the disaster site and allows for quick recovery of services. Once the disaster is mitigated, services can be restored back to the local enterprise. aws elastic disaster recovery