Mastering cloud recovery: A strategic blueprint for IT leaders

This week, Cutover CPO Marcus Wildsmith attended the Toronto Operational Resilience for Financial Institutions conference and spoke about how IT leaders should approach cloud recovery. The aims of the session were to help organizations:

• Understand the key considerations for building robust application recovery strategies in both on-premises and cloud deployments
• Learn how effective automation techniques can streamline recovery operations
• Examine how to rehearse realistic disaster recovery plans with automated runbooks to assess their plan's effectiveness and make continuous improvements
• Hear real-world insights and case studies on challenges and learnings for managing cloud disaster recovery with confidence

Below is a recap of what he shared at that event and more information about cloud disaster recovery and Cutover.

Cloud disaster recovery challenges

In 2024, organizations face increased disaster recovery challenges to ensure they can recover their thousands of applications. These challenges can be categorized into four areas:

1. Application portfolio challenges, including cost optimization and budget constraints, application and data dependencies, and continued migration and modernization adding complexity.
2. Legacy system challenges, including legacy ITSM and ITIL tools and processes, flat headcounts and a shortage of skilled workers, and outdated technology and technical debt.
3. Cloud and SaaS complexity, including hybrid cloud complexity, cloud-centric disaster recovery solutions, multi-cloud, and the shared responsibility model
4. The growing regulatory landscape, leading to increased responsibility to minimize customer impact, growing regulatory compliance requirements, and emerging sovereignty standards.

These key challenges can make ensuring cloud recovery a daunting task. While many organizations are under the impression that operating in the cloud makes resilience automatic, it can actually create more complexity which needs to be understood and managed to keep cloud applications up and running.

Application and enterprise complexity make cloud disaster recovery challenging

Although operating on the cloud has many benefits, it can also increase complexity at an application and enterprise level, making recovery more challenging. Scale this up to thousands of applications and services and ensuring recovery is a huge task. On top of that, many organizations are dealing with:

• Increased expectation to rapidly respond so they can maintain services
• Inconsistent and often manual processes
• A complex and rapidly changing technology environment
• Limited team capacity and key person dependency
• Difficulty ensuring regulatory compliance

The right tooling is needed to provide organizations with the visibility and control they need to recover rapidly and report to regulators while reducing manual effort.

The blueprint for cloud disaster recovery

This is where Cutover comes in. The Cutover platform brings together all aspects of the end-to-end cloud disaster recovery process, providing the visibility and control needed to protect customers and report to regulators.

Below is an outline of how the Cutover platform fits into an organization’s cloud recovery strategy:

Cutover enables organizations to create a defined set of recovery plans and configured scenarios to be as prepared as possible. Organizations can then use this to execute with minimal notice and close the gap between testing and live invocation.

Cutover cloud disaster recovery with AWS

When major organizations are managing their cloud recovery posture, complex cloud dependencies can make it difficult to prioritize and scale recovery efforts. Cloud disaster recovery activities are often scattered across multiple tools and there’s a lack of visibility of the cloud disaster recovery status across hundreds or thousands of workloads. Plus, the growing regulatory landscape makes it difficult to test and prove cloud failover to regulators.

With the help of AWS and Cutover, our customers are able to:

• Centralize and standardize cloud disaster recovery execution across hybrid or multi-cloud environments to reduce ClickOps
• Orchestrate thousands of workload failovers in one click
• Have full cloud disaster recovery visibility with real-time dashboards across multiple runbooks
• Test and prove cloud recovery to regulators

There are three phases to cloud disaster recovery. Cutover integrates with each of the relevant AWS services for these phases to provide a central platform and make managing all cloud disaster recovery activities more easily:

Cutover for cloud disaster recovery

Cutover’s Collaborative Automation SaaS platform enables enterprises to simplify complexity, streamline work, and increase visibility. Cutover’s automated runbooks connect teams, technology, and systems, increasing efficiency and reducing risk in cloud disaster recovery.

Cutover standardizes and automates global communications in one place, so the right people are engaged at the right time and senior stakeholders are kept informed. Real-time dashboards allow users to monitor the status of work across the organization, identify areas that require immediate attention, and continuously improve internal processes. The platform’s immutable and auto-generated audit log makes regulatory reporting and continuous improvement simple. Cutover also integrates with other tools via REST API.

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Find out more about Cutover for cloud disaster recovery or request a demo to see the platform in action.