Real Disaster Recovery (DR) with MultiCloud Strategy

Disaster Recovery is certainly a very important phenomenon, especially when it comes to cloud deployment. It is not new when a complete Data Centre or even some region of the cloud provider falls apart or to be accurate, goes down. It is a commonly observed incident that requires careful observation and keen solutions. The victims of this type of disaster are the famous cloud providers- Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and many more.

?The biggest strategy such cloud providers adopt is Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity, which ensures that despite the data center being down in one region, one can continue to work in another region. However, this strategy tends to have numerous disadvantages, such as a huge capacity crunch to name a few. But before discussing the disadvantages of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity, we should first understand what is Disaster Recovery and what are the plans as well as strategies to overcome it.

What Is Disaster Recovery?

What makes any system trustworthy? Well, of course, its working capacity. How does it work under crucial circumstances, whether they are normal or abnormal? So, basically, a system becomes reliable when it works all normal and without any discrepancy in any situation. But what if it starts to hamper and this hampering or should we call discrepancy is what we call a disaster. The term ‘Disaster Recovery’ refers to the point where the system is safeguarded against any malicious working, both accidental as well as man-made.

?The essential components of any efficient Disaster recovery plan are a persistent network, full-proof Data backup, complete protection, and many more.

What Are The Measures Taken in Disaster Recovery?

There is no single fixed plan for all types of disasters, so different strategies are used to achieve recovery. The most important activities are Prevention, detection, and correction:

●?????Prevention: This helps to prevent accidents, detects, and reduces uncertainty. This includes the use of screens for data archiving and surge protection.

●?????Detective: This helps to identify and sort problems in various areas such as monitoring the network, running training courses, and installing servers.

●?????Fixed: The system returns the target after an event occurs. This includes relevant documentation and insurance policies.?

Objectives Required for Disaster Recovery Plan-

The three major objectives any Disaster Recovery plan to get fulfilled are- Business Continuity Planning (BCP), Recovery Time Objective (RTO), and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).?

1.???Business Continuity Planning (BCP)

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is the process of building systems to prevent and recover companies from potential business threats.?The BCP is designed to protect people and property and to quickly launch in the event of a natural disaster.

2.??Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum amount of time that a system, computer, network, or application can remain in an unhealthy state after a failure or disaster. RTO is the duration in which the failure hampers normal operation and the loss of revenue per unit time due to the failure/disaster. These factors also depend on the equipment and applications used. RTO is measured in seconds, minutes, hours, or days. This is an important aspect of a disaster recovery plan (DRP).

3.??Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the time duration that is required to restore an organization's operations after a catastrophic event, such as a cyberattack, natural disaster, or any other failure. This is an important part of a disaster recovery plan and is usually combined with RTO, which is the maximum recovery time for reaccessing the normal functioning.

However, these plans and strategies may not be as effective as Multi-Cloud DR in which a different cloud provider is enrolled for DR strategy. Multi-region DR or Cross-Region DR may not be as effective. Don't believe in us? Well, let us know why.

Reasons Why Cross-region Disaster Recovery is Not Much Effective

1.??Single Region AWS or Azure failure May Cause Other Region to Fail As Well

Let us understand this by a simple example. Suppose there is a company (or rather companies) based on the eastern side of the US. For quicker disaster recovery, they may have their other offices set up on the western side as well. Now due to unavoidable circumstances, the eastern side data setup fails or goes down. What this will lead to? An increased load on the western side’s cross-region DR setups. This increased load may cause this setup to fail as well. It is unlikely that the cross-region DR has a huge loading spare capacity, that too of an entire region. Besides, it may also happen that both the regions’ cloud setups fail as well. It's hard to believe that AWS has enough free resources in the Western US region to move all traffic to the US East without consequences. Similar concepts apply to the US East and US West Azure regions. Even if the AWS US-East region is down for some reason, it is very likely that the Azure AS-East region is down at the same time. And it's far less likely that US West Azure will collapse at the same time. Also, since few companies use a multi-cloud disaster recovery strategy, the increase in Azure traffic due to the AWS outage is negligible.

2.??AWS and Azure Are Not Fully Independent

The previously mentioned reason is conceivably one reason that none of the cloud suppliers make it extremely simple to have a mechanized DR in another area. As the cloud suppliers realize that it can have a flowing impact where one region going down might potentially influence another region and those could go down too. For an instance, in AWS the Relational Database Service (RDS) presently permits having perused copies in another area and Simple Storage Service (S3) permits recreation across various regions. This implies that administrations like RDS, AWS S3,?and Azure Storage are presently worldwide administrations. These are likely to interact with each other across various regions.

3.??Higher Protection of Data in Multiple Clouds In Case Of Mistaken Deletion??

Now, what happens when an employee mistakenly or deliberately deletes the data as well as the backup? Of course, the company is ruined. But saving data on multiple clouds (just copying and pasting) and not providing all the credentials to a single person can prove beneficial. One employee should be provided access to one cloud. So, even if the data gets deleted from one cloud, there is always a strong backup that can be retrieved at any moment. Therefore, storing data on multiple clouds is way more advantageous. This also mitigates the risk of data hijacking and its purposely deletion. Hijackers can fully hijack your one data provider’s account and deliberately delete the company's data along with the backup from it. But, storing data on different cloud services and saving the credentials distinctly can help overcome the issue.

Conclusion

So, we have observed that storing data on multiple cloud services will not only protect it from theft or deletion, it will also allow faster recovery in case of any disaster. In the event that an organization needs REAL Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity methodology, it certainly needs to consider multi-cloud DR. Going for multi-cloud DR is undoubtedly more challenging, but in the end, it is surely worth it.