Cyberthreats can disrupt a business without notice, turning a peaceful day at the office into a nightmare scenario where systems are down, and your business is unable to meet the needs of your clients.
Likewise, severe weather, natural disasters, and hardware failure can have an equally catastrophic impact on a business.
Whether or not you’ve faced a cyberincident or natural disaster before, your business must be prepared to respond to these challenges or face the consequences.
Hybrid cloud disaster recovery solutions offer businesses a way to increase resilience and weather the toughest storms, literally and figuratively.
In this blog, we’ll uncover what hybrid disaster recovery actually means, and why more businesses are using this strategy for backup and disaster recovery in the cloud and on premises.
What is Hybrid Cloud Disaster Recovery?
Most traditional backup and disaster recovery solutions work by regularly making local physical backup copies of critical business assets like databases, customer information, network configurations, and settings.
While these backups are quick to restore downed systems, they also require extensive on-premises hardware that is also costly and prone to damage and failure over time.
As cloud based systems have exploded in popularity, disaster recovery in the cloud has become more commonplace. Because data in cloud disaster recovery systems is stored on secure servers off site, this method is resistant to physical damage like flooding and fire. However, relying exclusively on cloud based recovery solutions results in slow recovery times, while also requiring significant on-going monthly costs to keep active.
Each of these methods has their own pros and cons, but a hybrid cloud disaster recovery plan offers a combined approach that creates synchronized copies of your data:
- Local server-based storage that allows for rapid recovery when system files are corrupted or accidentally deleted
- Cloud backup off-site that serves as long term backup in the event of a cyber attack, or when hardware fails or is destroyed
Instead of relying on one single method of disaster recovery, this dual approach eliminates the major drawbacks of cloud or local-only backups, creating a redundancy that gives organizations the scalability and protection of the cloud, combined with the speed of local hardware.
Benefits of Hybrid Cloud Disaster Recovery
A hybrid cloud disaster recovery approach offers significant advantages over singular methods.
Some of the key advantages of hybrid cloud disaster recovery include:
- Minimal downtime: A hybrid approach takes the best of cloud and local backups, ensuring business continuity with minimal downtime.
- Improved security: Your most sensitive data can be stored locally, while other less sensitive data can live in the cloud. This keeps your data compliant as well as secure
- Cost effectiveness: A hybrid approach means less reliance on expensive physical hardware, utilizing pay-as-you-go models of cloud services to limit upfront expense.
- Increased redundancy: Data is backed up in multiple locations, with some companies even opting for multi-cloud disaster recovery that leverages both private and public cloud backups in addition to local physical backs.
- Scalability: Cloud systems are scalable, allowing organizations to only pay for what they need now, while still leaving room to grow in the future.
How to Plan Hybrid Cloud Disaster Recovery, Step-By-Step
So you’re ready to implement a hybrid cloud disaster recovery approach. Where do you begin? Let’s break down the essential steps to create a hybrid cloud disaster recovery solution:
1. Assess Risks
Successful disaster recovery planning starts with gathering an inventory of your most critical assets that require protection, like data, applications, and infrastructure. You’ll also want to gauge each asset’s vulnerability to cyberattacks, natural disasters, and hardware failures.
2. Define Objectives
Next, determine how critical each of the assets identified are to your business operations. Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) are set to establish criteria for how quickly each system must be restored, as well as Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) which establish an upper limit for acceptable data loss.
3. Select Your Tools for Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
There are many cloud disaster recovery platforms to choose from, but the one you select should feature continuous data replication tools that synchronize your data across a hybrid cloud disaster recovery system with local backups. An automated failover process, which ensures your backup takes action when an issue arises, is vital to minimize downtime.
4. Implement Compliance and Security
Your disaster recovery systems should be aligned with data security requirements like GDPR, PCI DSS, and other industry standards. Data should be encrypted both locally and in the cloud, as well as in transit. Strict controls should be put in place to limit access within your organization to your data and recovery plans.
5. Define Your Disaster Recovery Plan
Develop extensive documentation for the procedures your organization must follow when an incident occurs, including procedures for failover and fallback, how issues are escalated, and who is ultimately in charge when something goes wrong.
6. Ensure Regular Testing
The only way to truly ensure that your team is prepared to handle a disaster incident is to conduct regular testing to validate your recovery plan. With each test, you’ll gain valuable insight that can be used to further refine and improve your disaster recovery cloud hybrid performance
7. Track Cost and Optimize
Using a hybrid cloud disaster recovery approach allows you to reduce costs by using local storage for critical data, while using measured amounts of cloud storage for less sensitive data. Regularly monitor your cloud costs, and optimize your storage needs so that you don’t pay for more than you need, and scale up only when needed.
Need Help Preparing a Hybrid Cloud Disaster Recovery Plan?
The threats that businesses face are constantly changing. From advanced cyberattacks to natural disasters and aging hardware failures, having a rock solid disaster recovery plan isn’t optional, it’s a necessity for modern businesses.
Hybrid cloud disaster recovery plans give modern businesses the peace of mind knowing that they can withstand disaster, whatever form it arrives in.
If establishing a hybrid cloud disaster recovery feels overwhelming, don’t worry. The team at ITque is ready to help.
Our team of experienced IT professionals has access to the tools and industry knowledge to help you establish a disaster recovery plan that leverages the speed of local backups with the resilience and scalability of cloud based platforms.
We can help you identify your biggest vulnerabilities and recommend the ideal tools that will help you create a hybrid cloud disaster recovery plan tailored to your needs.
Don’t wait for a disaster to strike before establishing a recovery plan. ITque is ready to help you take full advantage of the full power of hybrid cloud disaster recovery. Contact ITque today for an initial consultation and let us safeguard your business against unexpected disasters.