How do you recover from cloud computing disasters?

1 Define your recovery objectives

Before you start designing your cloud disaster recovery plan, you need to identify your recovery objectives for each of your cloud services and applications. These include the Recovery Point Objective (RPO), which is the maximum amount of data loss that can be tolerated in a disaster, and the Recovery Time Objective (RTO), which is the maximum amount of time that can be spent offline or unavailable. The recovery objectives will vary depending on the criticality, complexity, and interdependency of your cloud services and applications, as well as budget and compliance requirements. This will determine how frequently you need to back up data and applications, where it should be stored, how quickly it needs to be restored, and what resources are required.

2 Choose your recovery model

Depending on your recovery objectives, you can choose from different cloud disaster recovery models. Backup and restore is the simplest and cheapest model, where you back up data to another cloud or on-premises location and restore it when needed. This is suitable for low-priority or non-critical data and applications that have high RPO and low RTO. Alternatively, the pilot light model is a hybrid approach, where you keep a minimal version of your cloud environment running in a secondary location and scale it up when needed. This is suitable for medium-priority or critical data and applications that have low RPO and medium RTO. Lastly, the warm standby model is a fully replicated approach, where you keep a full copy of your cloud environment running in a secondary location at a reduced capacity and switch to it when needed. This is suitable for high-priority or mission-critical data and applications that have low RPO and low RTO.

3 Implement your recovery plan

Once you have chosen your recovery model, you need to implement your recovery plan. This includes selecting the tools and services that match your budget and cloud provider, configuring the settings such as backup frequency and encryption, documenting the procedures and roles, as well as testing and monitoring the plan regularly. It is essential to test the plan under different scenarios to ensure it meets your recovery objectives, and to update it as needed.

4 Follow best practices

To ensure that your cloud disaster recovery plan is effective and efficient, you should align it with your business continuity plan, assess risks and vulnerabilities, review your cloud provider's SLA and policies, and train your staff and stakeholders. Conducting a risk assessment and a vulnerability analysis will help you identify potential threats and impacts of a cloud disaster on your data and applications. Additionally, reviewing your cloud provider's service level agreement (SLA) and policies will give you an understanding of their responsibilities and guarantees for availability, reliability, security, and data protection. Finally, training your staff and stakeholders on how to execute and maintain the plan is essential for successful communication and collaboration during a disaster.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?