Cloud computing is moving to its next era - multi-cloud adoption. Gartner states that over 80% of businesses already use more than one cloud service provider (CSP). For IT disaster recovery, incorporating a multi-cloud strategy reduces risk while increasing reliability and geographical diversity for your applications . However, it also adds significant complexity to the overall management and disaster recovery (DR) strategies.
This article provides an overview of multi-cloud DR, the benefits and disaster recovery challenges, and the importance of cloud disaster recovery software.
What is multi-cloud disaster recovery?
Multi-cloud disaster recovery (DR) is the strategy of using more than one CSP to protect and recover data and workloads in the event of a disaster or IT service disruption. By distributing workloads across different cloud environments, enterprises can significantly enhance their resilience against disasters such as natural calamities, hardware failures, or cyberattacks. This approach offers redundancy, flexibility, and increased data protection, ultimately ensuring business continuity and minimizing application downtime in the face of unforeseen challenges..
Benefits of multi-cloud DR
A multi-cloud disaster recovery strategy allows you customization that simply isn’t possible with a single CSP. Here are some common benefits:
Increase reliability and resilience
It’s highly unlikely that multiple public CSPs (AWS, Google, Azure) will go down at the same time. By designing disaster recovery plans for workloads across multiple clouds, you remove the risk of a single point of failure and inherently reduce the risk of data loss and downtime. In the event of an outage in one CSP’s region or availability zone (AZ), your workloads can be redirected to the other cloud.
Enhanced data protection
Multiple copies of your data can be stored across different clouds, providing a safety net against accidental loss or corruption.
Risk mitigation
Experimenting with multiple providers allows you to test different disaster recovery strategies and identify potential vulnerabilities.
Comply with data privacy laws and regulations
Enterprises with global operations need to ensure they can comply with local data and privacy laws including GDPR. A multi-cloud approach gives you the flexibility to choose a public CSP in one region, and choose another for a region with stricter limitations, such as Germany.
Leverage new technologies
The major CSPs are constantly investing in enhancements and creating new products and services. By spreading workloads across providers, you can leverage the latest advancements from each - advancing your disaster recovery processes faster.
Multi-cloud disaster recovery challenges
Compared to on-premises IT disaster recovery, cloud DR is more complex. When you add in more than one cloud provider, the complexity multiplies, including:
Increased management and maintenance complexity
While there are commonalities when operating in the cloud, each CSP may have nuances that need to be accounted for:
- Different configurations, application architectures, and dependency mappings
- Increased susceptibility to bugs, patches and upgrades
- Inconsistent security protocols or service level agreements (SLAs) across vendors
- Data integration issues between applications
- Data location and recovery processes
Lack of IT skill expertise
Many IT professionals focus their training on one CSP - gaining certifications and experience. A talent pool full of specialists makes it difficult to find IT people that are experts in multiple cloud platforms, which could lead to issues taking longer to resolve, outsourcing support,or hiring multiple people to support each cloud.
Complicated multi-cloud DR testing scenarios
With any disaster recovery strategy, you need to test it regularly to validate its effectiveness.
While IT disaster recovery testing is always complex, multi-cloud compounds it. You’ll likely
have multiple teams and IT cloud specialists involved in planning and need to work directly with the various cloud vendors. During the recovery, testing all application layers: location, network, storage, compute and services.
Measuring recovery time actuals (RTAs)
Multi-cloud disaster recovery is complex and demanding - varying SLAs guaranteeing recovery time objectives (RTOs). It’s important to capture RTAs and ensure that it is less than the recovery time objective (RTO) outlined in the cloud disaster recovery plan.
Key components of a multi-cloud DR strategy
A likely multi-cloud DR scenario is an active-passive model in which an application is deployed to a primary CSP and the backup is deployed to secondary CSP. The only time the second CSP is used is during a failure or outage. At that time, traffic is routed to the backup.
Regardless of the multi-cloud DR strategy you implement, you need to include key components to ensure your DR plan is setup for success.
Define and distribute applications by criticality
As with any IT disaster recovery plan, you need to assess and inventory workloads by criticality. Consider characteristics, dependencies and recovery objectives. For example, your mission-critical or Tier 1 applications will likely require a recovery time objective (RTO) in seconds or minutes and you need to consider if there are integrations or dependencies that impact the recovery process.
Data replication and backup
Storing and copying data is critical to avoid data loss during an outage or failure. In a multi-cloud DR scenario,you should build a data replication strategy across multiple CSPs to utilize various services and move applications between clouds.
Automate failover and failback
The failover and failback process is more complex in the cloud and when scaled for hundreds or thousands of applications, is very time consuming. Automate disaster recovery, including the failover and failback processes, to increase efficiency, reduce potential human error, and save time.
Testing and validation
As mentioned above, a multi-cloud DR process is complicated and requires thorough testing and validation. A good rule of thumb is to execute a DR simulation at least once per year. The simulation emulates an application outage scenario so you are testing your failover and failback processes in the most realistic way possible.
In addition to annual testing, you need to consider the timing of new IT personnel. Getting people up to speed and real world experience with a DR test before an outage happens, can reduce delays and lessen recovery times.
Cutover supports a multi-cloud DR strategy
Cutover Recover enables you to take multi-cloud disaster recovery plans and build automated runbooks to simplify DR execution.
- Visualize dependencies, link recovery plans with parent/child relationships
- Centralized runbook repository for all recovery activities
- Pre-approved runbook template library for easy use
- A real-time dashboard of recovery progress and immutable audit log of every action
- Orchestration of tasks (manual and automated) and dependencies from one central platform
- Dynamic management of the critical paths to mitigate risks
- Automated integrations with AWS services (example: Elastic Disaster Recovery, Fault Injection Service, Relational Database Service)
To learn more about Cutover for multi-cloud disaster recovery and how to enhance your resilience in cloud management, schedule a demo today.