Abstract

Disaster Recovery (DR) is one of the most important as well as a problematic part of any
business. It is now considered as business process rather than IT process. Cloud computing has
changed the scenario of DR. Nowadays organisations are showing their interest towards cloud
computing based DR. In this work, we will discuss about the basics of DR as well as how cloud
computing can be used in order to perform disaster recovery. We have also compared the
traditional and cloud-based DR services under various heads.

Introduction
Nowadays data is considered as business. Any organisation wants the data it deals with to be
protected from any disaster. Whenever any crash occurs there is high chance that the data will
be lost and often it may result into financial loss also. Thus, any organisation would want that
at the time of any disaster, their data should not get lost.

However, 100% guarantee safety from any disaster is a far stretched statement. This is because
one cannot predict how severe the disaster will be and how much loss it can cause. This is
where the concept of disaster recovery comes into picture. DR service ensure that after any
disaster (technical or natural), the organisation can recover to their original state that was there
before the disaster occurred.
Traditional DR services have various issues and challenges like high implementation cost,
higher time of recovery and many more. Also, business is reluctant to provide funds for DR
before the upper management gets full understanding of the risk related to disaster, which often
they don’t get. The cost and the complexity of implementing a DR is increasing day by day
and thus with the introduction of cloud technology, these problems are solved up to some
extent.

Cloud Computing Overview

Cloud computing is a technology that provides a customer with various computer services like,
storage, networking, software and many more just with a click over the Internet. It follows a
“pay-as-you-go” model of business which means that the customers will only pay for the
services of the cloud they are availing without the need to install any software on their systems.
With rapid increase in the demand for fast and cheaper computation processes, the
organisations are showing their interest towards various cloud computing services. Disaster
Recovery is one of them.

Disaster Recovery
A Disaster is any unexpected event that causes huge loss to anyone which includes loss of life
also. Disaster can be on any type such as:

 Natural
 Technical
 Man Made
Any business wants to continue in its original state after facing a disaster. Thus DR is the
recovery of the important business asset back to its original state. Any business wants to
minimize their recovery time as well as the data loss due to a disaster.

Disaster Recovery Requirements

Traditional Backup and Recovery Method

Cloud based Disaster Recovery

With cloud computing, encapsulation of entire server together with the applications, operating
system and data into single bundle takes place. This bundle acts as a virtual server which is
then copied to vendor site (offsite data centre), which acts as a backup server and can be
recovered quickly at the time of any failure.

Virtual servers do not depend on any kind of hardware and thus the bundle can be transferred
from one location (data centre) to another without any other location safely and accurately.

In order to ensure the failover, the remote site has a running virtual machine which is in sync
with the production site. So, at the time of any failure this virtual machine will act as the
production machine to ensure data integrity during the recovery operations.

How It Works: Backup and Recovery

The cloud disaster recovery is a backup and storage strategy that involves backing up of data,
virtual machines, servers and corporate networks. It uses the services of public cloud such as
AWS, Azure etc to create a backup of the resources and then at the time of a disaster these
resources are restored to the original site from the cloud backup.

The basic functioning of a cloud-based disaster recovery solution are as follows:

  The production site pushes data to the cloud using VPN tunnelling.
 The data received at the vendor site is stored for both use and recovery. This data is
kept synchronised with the data in production.
 The implementation of virtual servers ensures that in an event of failure of the
production server these servers can be operated any time. Depending on the RTO the
recovery of applications can be done with or without the product key. Synchronization
of the production and backup virtual server is must which means that if any changes or
updates takes place in the application at the production zone, same needs to be reflected
at the backup virtual server also.
 At the time of recovery, the users are redirected to the cloud site.

Different Approaches to Cloud-Based DR

There are 4 approaches which one can take to cloud based DR. Different approaches
includes different cloud resources and different manner of its deployment.

1) Backup and Recovery: This is a straight forward approach of DR in which backups

of the data is taken and is stored in storage provided by cloud and recovering of the
same after the disaster. This approach may become difficult to implement if the RTO
and RPO requirement is high.
2) Pilot Light: In this approach whole production servers and databases are copied onto a
separate environment in the cloud. This copy is present in the cloud at all times. This
cloud configuration is synchronised at each and every point with the production
environment. However, this environment requires some time to get activated after any
disaster occurs in the production environment.
3) Warm standby: This approach is quite similar to the pilot light approach. However, in
this case the backup servers and databases are activated and are running at all times. It
provides almost instantaneous recovery of the production environment after a disaster.
4) Multi-Site: This concept is similar to warm standby. However, in this case the copies
of the production environment are stored at multiple geographic location and these
backups are in a running state at all the time. Thus, the availability quotient is high in
this approach. However, the cost of implementing this approach is highest among all
the approaches.

Benefits of DRAAS
Cloud based DR model has many benefits over the traditional DR model. The diagram below
reflects the same.
 Fig XX. Cost-Recovery Time comparison of various DR models

1) Security
The security of the cloud-based DR depends upon the cloud service provider. By
providing a level of encryption for both the data at rest as well as in transition DRaaS
ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the data.
2) Faster Recovery Time
The replication of entire network as well as the security configuration of production site
on the recovery site ensures higher speed of recovery by cutting the time taken to
configure firewalls, VPN, VLAN and other security solutions before the recovery site
go live.
3) Cost
Cloud storage is based on pay as you go model. Therefore, you have to pay only for the
storage that you need without the need of paying for capital expenses. Cloud-based DR
also reduces the initiation, operational as well as disaster cost of a disaster recovery
plan.
4) Flexibility
The storage capacity on the cloud can be increase and decreased effectively as per the
dynamic demand of the organisation. Therefore, the business need not to worry about
whether the storage will be enough for the data.

Conclusion
Cloud based disaster recovery offers a faster, more accurate and lesser cost recovery solution.
Organisations are realizing the benefits that DRaaS offers.