Cloud-Powered Disaster Recovery: Faster, Cheaper, Better

Data is a value asset. Downtime affects your entire business, including customer trust and revenue. Cloud disaster recovery with Microsoft Azure ensures fast recovery to minimise disruption and provide business continuity.

It’s essential for all businesses to have a disaster recovery plan to protect data and applications in the event of a cyber attack or natural disaster. Public cloud services such as Azure provide cutting edge security and IT services to help keep your business protected if something goes wrong. 

Highly flexible and scalable, a cloud-based disaster recovery plan will help you to safeguard critical information and get your business back on track.

The importance of disaster recovery plans

Data access is crucial for business agility, availability, and connectivity. For large scale organisations, the cost of IT downtime can run into the thousands per minute. Minor breaches can escalate into catastrophic losses and while a strong security system can reduce the risk, even the most resilient systems are not immune to IT disasters.

Data recovery plans are proactive security measures to prepare for disasters and reduce their impact. With a disaster recovery plan in place, companies can ensure continuous operations, protect their reputation, and avoid regulatory consequences.

Why migrate to the cloud for disaster recovery?

Cloud disaster recovery allows for remote backup and recovery on a cloud platform, providing faster data availability, automated backups, and adaptive scalability. Here, we’ll look at some of the key advantages of moving your IT infrastructure to a public cloud.

Improved recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO)

Cloud-based disaster recovery plans can help businesses achieve optimal Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) to minimise downtime, salvage data, and enable quick restoration of operations following a disruption.

Cloud-based services can rapidly deploy and automate recovery processes, ensuring that your critical systems get back online swiftly. By automating backups at shorter intervals, Microsoft Azure services reduce the amount of potential data loss. With real-time or near-real-time data replication to secondary locations, data is continuously synchronised. In many cases, data can be recovered from the cloud in minutes, bypassing the need for time-consuming on-site recovery that requires scripting and manual administration.

Cost savings and resource optimisation

If your business runs its own private data centre, it can be costly to design and implement a disaster recovery plan. It can be time consuming and expensive to maintain your own physical servers, establish backup infrastructure, and recruit cyber security professionals to handle and safeguard data. 

By migrating to a public cloud, there’s no longer a need for in-house servers, hardware, or software for data storage. Plus, your licensing and logistics costs will be covered, too.

Predicting and preparing for future threats

With advanced analytics tools, cloud-based disaster recovery solutions can examine the patterns of past incidents to predict future threats. Azure Cloud Security provides added confidence thanks to high-grade encryption, security certifications, and multifaceted authentication processes. 

With real-time proactive monitoring, cyber security teams can detect potential threats or anomalies early, making it easier to respond to risks before they escalate into major disruptions.

Key components of cloud-powered disaster recovery

Continuity strategies form the foundation of an effective disaster recovery plan. These procedures aim to recover data, restore systems, and maintain business operations in challenging scenarios – they should be regularly tested to ensure your team is ready to respond swiftly to any disruptions.

Creating your own disaster recovery plan means managing your own risk assessments, clearing communication channels across crisis response teams, and training your staff. By migrating to a cloud disaster recovery service, you can free up resources for other business operations. 

The key components of cloud-based disaster recovery services include:

• • Data Backup and Storage: Data backup and storage in cloud-powered disaster recovery involves securely replicating your critical data and applications to remote cloud servers. This ensures that copies of your important information are stored off-site, reducing the risk of data loss due to localised disasters or hardware failures. 
  • Automated Backups: Regularly copying your critical data and applications to secure locations is essential for an effective disaster recovery plan, and automating this process ensures you have up-to-date backups, while reducing the risk of human error. 
  • Scalability: Your disaster recovery plan should grow with your data. Based on your current recovery demands, cloud-based products can dynamically coordinate resource allocation so that your resources scale up during peak usage periods and unexpected disasters. On the flipside, resource allocation can scale down during periods of lower demand and business changes, optimising cost-efficiency.

Best practices for cloud disaster recovery

Develop a comprehensive disaster recovery plan

Your company data is vital to your operations and any loss could be potentially disastrous. 

Creating a disaster recovery plan involves outlining specific processes for recovering data, restoring systems, and ensuring that business activities continue to run smoothly during the disaster. The plan should be thorough and cover various scenarios – from minor incidents to major catastrophes — ensuring that every aspect of the organisation’s infrastructure and operations are accounted for.

Testing & updating recovery strategies

Updating and testing your disaster recovery plan through simulations will help you improve its effectiveness. Conducting regular drills will help to refine your recovery procedures, while making sure everyone in your team knows their roles and responsibilities in a crisis scenario. Additionally, gathering feedback from these exercises – as well as from real incidents – provides useful insights into where your plan could be strengthened. 

Continuous monitoring and improvement

Regular monitoring of systems and processes helps to detect potential vulnerabilities and emerging threats. Getting hold of these early allows you to take proactive measures to mitigate risks. Periodic reviews and updates to your disaster recovery plan will ensure it remains relevant and effective as your organisation’s needs and tech landscape evolve.

Integrating cyber security into cloud disaster recovery

In the event of a cyber attack, the resilience and reputation of your business will be defined by how quickly it responds. The key is to prepare ahead – through proactive planning, you can strengthen the security posture of your business to ensure continuity. 

Interactive has prepared a report that outlines six possible steps to embed cyber security posture into your business continuity plans. This report can be accessed through our article: 

Your cyber security posture will determine business resilience.  

How Interactive can help with disaster recovery

Commvault Metallic cloud data protection

 In 2022, Interactive proudly became the first to join the Commvault Partner Advantage Program in Australia and New Zealand as a Metallic Managed Service Provider (MSP). Metallic, a Commvault venture, is a comprehensive, cloud-based data protection solution that provides backup, recovery, and data management services. In this partnership with Interactive, Metallic offers a growing portfolio of SaaS backup and recovery solutions to help today’s companies keep their data protected, compliant, and safe from deletion, corruption, and attack.

Interactive Disaster Recovery

When you partner with Interactive, you can take advantage of our Disaster Recovery services to provide protection when it’s most needed. We operate secure data centres with built-in resilience and the latest technology to make sure your backup data remains stable and safe. We also offer rapid deployment in the case of an emergency – you can contact our security team 24/7 and we’ll have your suite operational within 20 minutes of your call.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between cloud backup and disaster recovery?

Cloud backup and disaster recovery serve different purposes. Cloud backup involves regularly copying data to a remote cloud server to ensure data availability and protection against data loss due to accidental deletion, hardware failures, or cyber attacks. It focuses on data retention and easy retrieval of individual files or databases.

In contrast, disaster recovery encompasses a broader strategy designed to restore an entire IT environment, including applications, systems, and data, following a significant disruption. Disaster recovery plans typically include predefined procedures and tools to quickly recover and resume normal operations, minimising downtime and ensuring business continuity.

Why is disaster recovery easier to implement in the cloud?

Disaster recovery is easier to implement in the cloud because it leverages scalable, flexible resources that can be quickly adjusted to meet your organisation’s needs. Cloud-based solutions offer automated backups, real-time data replication, and seamless failover capabilities, reducing the time required for setup and maintenance. Additionally, by minimising on-premises infrastructure, cloud disaster recovery is more accessible and cost-effective.