What Is Cloud DR (Cloud Disaster Recovery) and How Does It Work

What Is Cloud DR

Cloud DR is cloud disaster recovery, which is a combination of strategies and services designed to back up data, applications, and other resources to a public cloud or a dedicated service provider. When a disaster occurs, the affected data, applications, and other resources can be restored to the local data center-or cloud provider and resume normal operations for the enterprise.

The goal of cloud disaster tolerance is almost the same as that of traditional disaster tolerance: to protect valuable business resources and ensure that the protected resources can be accessed and restored to continue normal business operations. DR is a core element of any business continuity (BC) strategy.

Before the advent of cloud connectivity and self-service technologies, traditional DR options were limited to local DR and second-site implementation. Local disaster recovery is not always able to withstand disasters such as fires, floods, and earthquakes. The second site-remote disaster recovery provides better physical disaster protection but brings huge business costs to the implementation and maintenance of the second data center.

With the advent of cloud technology, public cloud and hosting service providers can create a dedicated facility to provide a wide range of effective backup and disaster recovery services and functions. Enterprises can continue to access highly automated, highly scalable, and self-driven off-site DR services without having to spend a second data center, and without having to select, install, and maintain DR tools.

Benefits of Cloud DR

There are many key advantages of using a cloud environment in a disaster recovery plan:

• Fast speed, with instant recovery function
• Safe, with a remote, protected environment
• Scalability, able to develop your cloud solutions with your business
• Compatibility, able to work with many different servers and systems

Cloud Components

The cloud component of a disaster recovery plan may involve various strategies for using the cloud environment.

Online or cloud backup: Using an online backup system allows you to regularly store data copies in a remote data storage environment. You can choose the workstations and servers you want to protect, perform an initial data load, and then only use incremental backups to keep the data up-to-date and safe.

Disaster recovery failover: Disaster recovery failover provides a cloud-based environment that is a complete reconstruction of your infrastructure. If you lose access to the main IT infrastructure, the environment is ready.

How Does Cloud Disaster Work?

Cloud disaster recovery adopts a completely different method from traditional disaster recovery. Cloud disaster recovery encapsulates the entire server (including operating system, applications, patches, and data) into a single software package or virtual server, instead of loading the operating system and application software onto the server and patching it to the last one used in production Configuration.

Then copy or back up the virtual server to a remote data center or start it on a virtual host within a few minutes. Since virtual servers are not dependent on hardware, operating systems, applications, patches, and data can be migrated from one data center to another faster than traditional disaster recovery methods.

Final Words

Here is all information about cloud DR. You can know the definition, benefits, and components of cloud data recovery. Besides, you can know how it works.