What is cloud disaster recovery and how does it work?

What is cloud disaster recovery?

Cloud disaster recovery (CDR) is a cloud-based managed service that helps you quickly recover your organization’s critical systems after a disaster and provides you remote access to your systems in a secure virtual environment.

When it comes to traditional DR, managing a secondary data center can be time consuming and costly. Cloud disaster recovery has changed everything when it comes to traditional DR by eliminating the need for traditional infrastructure and significantly reducing downtime. IT departments can now harness the power of the cloud for immediate spin-up and fail over. This creates faster recovery times at a fraction of the cost.

How does cloud disaster recovery work?

Cloud disaster recovery takes a very different approach than traditional DR. Instead of loading the servers with the OS and application software and patching to the last configuration used in production, cloud disaster recovery encapsulates the entire server, which includes the operating system, applications, patches, and data into a single software bundle or virtual server. The virtual server is then copied or backed up to an offsite data center or spun up on a virtual host in minutes. Since the virtual server is not dependent on hardware, the operating system, applications, patches, and data can be migrated from one data center to another much faster than traditional DR approaches.

How can RackWare help?

RackWare develops cloud management software that allows enterprises to migrate applications, provide disaster recovery and backup, and hybrid cloud management.

The RackWare Management Module(RMM) provides enterprises IT resilience by automating disaster recovery and backup to any cloud. Some of our features include:

For more information regarding how cloud disaster recovery can help you, contact us.

What to look for in cloud management solutions?

As cloud computing becomes essential for business agility, faster deployment, scalability, and reduced costs of ownership, more and more organizations are adopting multiple clouds. However, without the proper cloud management knowledge and expertise, managing multi-cloud environments can be extremely challenging and expensive due to downtime, performance issues, and negative experiences.

Because of this, many cloud management solutions have emerged to help organizations short on resources manage their public, private and hybrid cloud environments. According to a study done by Report Buyer, the multi-cloud management solution market is expected to grow nearly 300% from 2017 to 2022. Cloud management solutions are now driving operational efficiency through the unification of multi-cloud environments.

When evaluating cloud management solutions, you should consider the following eight factors:

• Provisioning and Orchestration - Manage the interconnections and interactions among workloads on your public and private cloud infrastructure. Connect automated tasks into a cohesive workflow to accomplish a goal, with permissions oversight and policy enforcement.

• Cost Management and Resource Optimization - Optimize resources to ensure maximum value from your multi-cloud environment with strategic thinking and careful planning.

• Cloud Migration, Backup and DR - Migrate your data and applications to the cloud while implementing proper backup and disaster recovery measures to ensure business continuity and rapid recovery of individual files, full applications, or entire data centers.

• Identity, Security and Compliance - Ensure your data and applications in your cloud environment stay secure from data breaches while also being compliant with data protection laws and policies.

• Packaging and Delivery - Assess your applications, learn how often they’re being used, and see who is using them. This allows you to deliver optimal cloud management functionality to end users.

• Monitoring and Analytics - Gain visibility and control over your cloud applications by understanding performance and availability of application components. Analyze results to ensure optimal performance and get notified when problems occur.

• Inventory and Classification - Scan your on-premises data center and infrastructure to identify which assets, i.e. servers, applications, etc. should be moved to the cloud.

• Service Request - Ensure the cloud service request process between IT and end users is as seamless as possible.

How Can RackWare Help?

RackWare’s Hybrid Cloud Management Suite provides agility within a multi-cloud environment, with rapid deployment, quick time-to-value, and lower IT expenses while optimizing application performance.

For more information on cloud management solutions, visit our hybrid cloud management page or contact a RackWare representative.

What is a cloud migration service and do I need one?

Everyday, organizations face challenges that require:

• Cost reduction

• Scalability

• Tighter security

• Latest Technology

• Improved reliability

• More support

And more and more often, the solution is the cloud.

Cloud migration services simplify the complex process of moving business data and applications to a cloud computing environment. In order transition to the cloud successfully, your cloud migration service should ask the following questions before the move:

• How large and complex are your data?

• How important are regulatory considerations?

• Are our current business applications cloud ready?

• What would the cost of downtime be and what service level agreement do we require for a cloud environment?

• If we decide to change cloud providers in the future, can our data and application migrate with us?

Once these questions are answered, your cloud migration service can recommend a customized solution and provide a cloud migration plan.

An IaaS cloud solution will lift your burden of operating an in-house data center and enable you to quickly ramp up IT and data center capabilities all while substantially reducing costs. It’s like renting a perpetually new car with all the latest features.

By teaming with your cloud migration service through co-location, you can choose just the right amount of dedicated hardware needed such as servers or racks that are regularly upgraded ensuring 24/7 system redundancy, security, and reliability.

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<p><strong>This infographic was created by <a href='https://www.rackwareinc.com'>RackWare</a></strong><br /><br /><a href='https://www.rackwareinc.com/cloud-migration-service'><img src='https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c1e6c1896e76f8c9319d545/t/5c3654cec2241b494bd8fe08/1547064529224/Cloud+computing+-+10+myths.png' alt='Top 5 Emerging Trends in the Disaster Recovery Industry' width='950px' border='0' /></a></p>

Attempting to migrate IT infrastructure into the cloud without a proper cloud migration service that is fully versed and capable in the aforementioned aspects can result in a situation where you endure extra costs due to downtime, performance issues, and a negative experience.

When looking at cloud migration services, be sure to choose one that creates customized cloud solutions and migration plans for a seamless transition to the cloud.

How can RackWare help?

RackWare helps organizations speed up and automate data and application migrations across all cloud environments. RackWare’s file-level replication technology, cloud and hypervisor support matrix, and flexible architecture have helped over 400 organizations migrate complex workloads to the cloud.

RackWare Management Module handles the cloud migration process outlined below:

* Available with RackWare Hybrid Cloud Management

For more information regarding how a cloud migration solution can help you, visit our cloud migration page or contact us.