How Cloud Innovation Can Transform Disaster Recovery

Mahesh Dixit is General Manager and Global Head, Oracle IaaS & PaaS, Business Application Services, Wipro Limited.

Many CIOs ponder over the benefits of replicating production and paying significant capital expenses for creating a disaster recovery environment. Such an environment is rarely used, as the occurrence of a disaster is a rare event.

Enterprises do agree that maintaining business continuity in the event of a disaster is essential. However, traditional methods of disaster recovery entail an enterprise to replicating data and applications on dedicated infrastructure. The enterprise spends resources to create, test and maintain this infrastructure for disaster recovery. While this is an effective way to ensure disaster recovery is in place, enterprises can forego these extensive costs by leveraging innovative cloud computing solutions.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offers an attractive alternative to traditional models by avoiding the outright purchase of servers, storage and licenses, and eliminating maintenance costs. Businesses pay for what they use, resulting in a significant reduction in costs and providing a viable solution for organizations. In the event of a disaster, it enables business continuity and provides with the ability to scale up rapidly and securely to meet business needs.

The Evolution of DRaaS

The basic premise of the traditional models of DR was that even in the event of a disaster, it must be business as usual. However, this notion has given way to more realistic expectations that call for only critical functions of the enterprise to remain operational in a disaster scenario. Companies are now willing to wait for a period of up to 48 hours for non-essential services to come back online. This means that while in the past, companies would need to invest in DR of 50 percent to 100 percent of primary site, this could well operate at below 5 percent on the cloud. DRaaS makes it possible to deploy additional infrastructure within 24-48 hours, something hitherto unthinkable in the traditional DR models.

Advantages of DRaaS

A cloud solution ensures high scalability and select vendors like Oracle provide high availability in the event of a disaster, providing data synchronization, centralized management and end-to-end data protection for heterogeneous technologies. The benefits of DR on cloud include:

Conclusion

Disaster recovery in a cloud configuration eliminates the costs and complexity of owning and managing an entire facility specifically for disaster recovery and facilitates a more customer-friendly operating expense model for standby systems and software. DRaaS is a one-stop-shop for a hassle-free setup in cloud with minimum initial expense and flexibility to scale to the production environment in a short span of time. As organizations seek more economically efficient methods of disaster recovery, the acceptance of DRaaS will increase – not just as a more effective way of being prepared for a disaster, but also to begin the journey to becoming a more cloud-native enterprise.

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