Using the Cloud for Disaster Recovery

There never seems to be enough money or time to get everything our business stakeholders want done, the stuff we know needs to get done and the stuff we want to do to make life better for everyone. It is hard enough to manage and maintain today's applications and data running the day-to-day business, let alone answer the age old "What if something happens to wipe out our data center?" question. You know, the hypothetical scenario the external auditors love to hit us IT guys with when doing their annual review for compliance. They spring it on us when we are answering the questions about password reset policies and anti-virus software updates. The curve ball they think they are throwing is the one that keeps us up at night, Disaster Recovery (DR). It's the project we request resources for every year and get denied due to budget constraints. Or worse, it gets approved and then de-prioritized due to more pressing new business opportunities.

I believe there is a way to solve the DR problem economically, quickly and with little to no upfront costs. Which can be a showstopper when the initial capital investments can't be tied back to any cost savings or revenue generation. It involves a minimalist approach for deploying systems into a cloud such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon's AWS. It doesn't have to be either of those, it could just be any managed services or cloud provider that has a utility payment model where you only pay for what you consume. And you need to be able to consume at a level that allows data to be sync'ed on a regular basis from your primary systems with minimal computing resources spun up. Should there be a disaster, the provider must enable you to quickly bring online the full scale of your applications and databases on a moments notice. Yes, the meter is running at full tilt and you will pay dearly for that time but it is much less expensive than staring at your cratered data center wondering how to bring systems back online. Never mind trying to guess which ones need to be there first and by when to keep the business running.

Our path to solve the Disaster Recovery challenge here at Lansing Trade Group, LLC is on track to deliver the right solution that doesn't waste resources, time or money on unnecessary tasks or expenses. We have successfully created prototypes of our application deployments, data synchronization and backup strategies by simply using a credit card to sign up and get started. We will have most if not all of our data center synchronized in a few months and ready for that day "something happens to wipe out our data center".