As-a-service and hybrid models can help organizations save significant time, money and resources on DR, while at the same time improving their overall disaster preparedness.
When the concept of disaster recovery (DR) first came about, there was really only one way to accomplish it: Build it yourself. When the corporate data center was the only place a company’s critical data could live — and the only place its most important applications could run — keeping that data center up and running with five-nines reliability was worth any effort and almost any price. Doing it right often included building a completely separate second data center for data protection to house all the redundant copies of data, all offsite backup, and complete DR systems.
Building a secondary data center just for DR is no longer a sustainable option, nor is it a necessary one. Thanks to the growing cloud adoption rate and cloud-forward co-lo providers, the data center world is transforming, which means more efficient and cost-effective options, such as hybrid DR.
That’s not to say that moving from an on-premises secondary data center to the cloud or a hybrid model happens with a snap of the fingers. It can be a complex process that has many moving parts, and the consequences of mistakes are severe. So, how do you make migrating your DR to the cloud as uneventful as possible? Having a plan is the surest way to ensure migration success.
Before you make a single change to your DR structure, break down and evaluate every aspect of your IT strategy, starting with immediate needs and continuing on to resource requirements and long-term goals. Here are some things to consider in your plan, before, during and after you move to the cloud.