While cloud computing offers many advantages and services to enhance resiliency, IT disaster recovery cannot be an afterthought. Cloud hosted infrastructure does not guarantee resilience even if designed with high availability architecture.
In this article, we provide an overview of cloud resiliency, the common misconceptions, potential risks, and importance of using cloud disaster recovery software.
Cloud resilience vs disaster recovery in the cloud
The differences between cloud and disaster recovery lie in their objectives. Cloud resiliency focuses on the prevention of outages and building systems that can withstand it. While cloud disaster recovery strategies focus on the restoration of access to systems and data in the event of a disaster. And, a cloud disaster recovery (DR) plan provides the step by step instructions to restoring IT systems and is an important component of a cloud resilience strategy.
Understanding cloud resilience and why it is not enough!
Organizations are increasingly moving to the cloud and there’s lots of promise for what the cloud can provide, but there are both advantages and disadvantages to having cloud hosted infrastructure.
Some cloud computing advantages include:
- Faster time to market
- Scalability and flexibility
- Cost savings
- Better collaboration
- Advanced security
- Data loss prevention
Misconceptions about cloud resilience
However, there are still misconceptions about what having your infrastructure in the cloud means for resilience. In our survey into the current state of IT disaster recovery and cloud resilience, 59% of respondents said that operating in the cloud makes you more resilient. The reality is much more complicated - many leaders seem to be underestimating the level of governance and structure that must be put in place to ensure cloud resilience.
Though 82% of our survey respondents said that disaster recovery is a key focus when operating in the cloud, only 52% have a multi-site active/active disaster recovery strategy for their mission-critical applications.
Operational risks in cloud computing
Operating in the cloud also creates added complexity, and this can make understanding and managing your resilience requirements even more challenging. There are still plenty of limitations and risks that come with operating in the cloud, such as:
- Risk of vendor lock in
- Less control over underlying cloud hosted infrastructure
- Concerns about security risks like data privacy and online threats
- Integration complexity with existing systems
- Unforeseen costs and unexpected expenses
There is still a need for disaster recovery in the cloud despite the promises of increased resilience.
The risks of poor cloud resilience
Uptime Institute found that increasing cloud and distributed techniques soften the impact of outages. However, over 50% of those surveyed have workloads they’re not willing to risk in the public cloud for reasons of resilience. There seems to be a dilemma between the added resilience in the cloud benefits vs the loss of control and what that could lead to.
There have certainly been some impactful outages caused by cloud failures in the last couple of years, including major outages at AT&T, Salesforce, and Microsoft, to name a few. The causes of these outages were varied, but they show that cloud hosting doesn’t mean you can forget about resilience and recovery.
Why you still need disaster recovery in the cloud: the reality
Common causes of cloud outages include natural disasters, cyber threats, human error, application defects, poorly designed architecture, and the organization’s inability to stay prepared for failure. Any of these can lead to knock-on effects such as end customers losing access to applications, revenue loss, loss of customer trust, loss of data, and challenges bringing up applications due to data inconsistencies.
The cost and frequency of outages have prompted 82% of organizations to focus on disaster recovery when operating in the cloud.
The shared responsibility of cloud resilience: providers and cloud users
Cloud providers don’t take all the responsibility of resilience off your plate. Your cloud deployment model dictates the level of responsibility for workload recovery and resilience. While using cloud providers can make your life easier, it can also lead to a loss of control over your applications and services.
It’s important to understand what your cloud provider is responsible for and what you are responsible for. Your cloud provider takes care of monitoring and responding to security threats related to the cloud itself and its underlying infrastructure, while you are responsible for protecting data and other assets stored in the cloud environment. Cloud users that don’t realize this can end up unknowingly running workloads in the public cloud that are not fully protected, making them vulnerable to attacks.
The ultimate solution for cloud resilience and disaster recovery
Most businesses are embracing the scaling and flexibility benefits that the cloud has to offer, but are unaware of the security and resilience risks that this new layer of complexity brings.
Gain confidence in your cloud resilience with Cutover automated runbooks. Standardize, codify, and automate your cloud DR processes and create cloud disaster recovery plan templates to gain confidence and improve resiliency.
Contact Cutover to learn more about best practices in cloud disaster recovery.