Unavailability of cloud services, power outages, and natural calamities like fires and tornadoes severely impact the businesses. With the reduced productivity and poor services, both the employees and the customers may find it challenging to quickly restore the lost trust. Mainly, if this continues for a longer time, there is a higher likelihood for your organization to experience a significant lost revenue and long-term reputation damage.
Businesses can resolve this issue by building a reliable multicloud disaster recovery (DR) plans. This system encourages you to keep up fundamental business activities, regardless of whether your cloud accomplice encounters a glitch or faces specific difficulties. If you are planning to integrate multicloud technology into your existing strategy, consider the various points highlighted below.
Importance of Multiple Cloud Environment
Using the multicloud strategy for DR opens up new possibilities for businesses. Today, a few undertakings have approved numerous clouds; some utilize Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS, while some others use IBM or Google Cloud. As per the recent research report by IBM, approximately 85% of businesses work in multicloud environments. Moreover, the more significant part of the associations that don’t have a multicloud IT techniques at present wants to grasp it in a matter of months.
The IBM researchers predict that 98% of enterprises will move to multiple hybrid clouds by 2021. Likewise, an ESG study uncovered that around 81% of organizations utilize various open cloud framework service providers, while just 15% are using a solitary cloud supplier.
Multiple cloud environment offers significant benefits for the organization. Cost is considered to be one of the most crucial driving factors. According to an IBM study comprising 1016 executives from 19 industries, almost 66% of them agreed to use multicloud technology because of reduced cost. Likewise, multiple clouds let you choose the most excellent services to fill your business necessities.
In addition, picking a multicloud technique empowers organizations to avoid seller lock-in, consequently decreasing their dependence on a single cloud administration.
How to Actualize a Multicloud Disaster Recovery (DR) Proposal?
It is crucial to plan your multicloud disaster recovery from start to finish such as identifying the goals, the right involvement of executives and service providers, determining the right tools and setting a well-thought schedule. These steps form a vital part of a successful multicloud disaster recovery initiative.
Consider the five key points given below to implement a multicloud DR plan:
1. Location
Businesses must have multiple instances of data and applications in different locations that fulfill the service-level agreements and ensure business continuity in any disaster. If in case, your cloud provider stores your applications or data in a single place, we recommend you to look for a partner that can deliver a flexible and more comprehensive multicloud touchpoint.
Embracing this multicloud DR approach makes your assets quickly available and protected from accidental deletion. The most secure system for a multicloud DR plan is to use various clouds in the same nation, however, in various geographic areas. Moving or storing data across international boundaries is not considered a good plan, as it builds up needless legal and regulatory restraints and impediments.
2. Right Tools
One can quickly utilize and replicate across multiple cloud providers with the right tools in hand. Certain top cloud services like CloudEndure is known to aid you to automate the process. Interestingly, UnitedLayer is equipped for reproducing outstanding tasks at hand to wide-running clouds and robotize multicloud relocations.
CliQr’s CloudCenter is another prominent hybrid cloud management platform with an ideal toolset to integrate and maintain DR use cases between public cloud and on-premise, or across various cloud providers. Here, it comprises of different scenarios like database-level disaster recovery (DB DR) and application-level disaster recovery (App DR).
Application organizations can traverse cloud areas utilizing CliQr, in a solitary cloud or over various merchants with DR empowered Application Profiles. In this case, the administrator specifies the amount of workload that runs in various spaces. He/she uses the single CloudCenter dashboard to handle overall application health across multicloud as quickly as a single cloud.
3. Number of Providers
As per the experts, one has to include at least two different cloud providers in a multicloud DR plan for maximum protection. Some providers operate separate regional cloud infrastructures, however the failure of a single infrastructure results in the overloading of the firm’s other infrastructures to an extent where they become unfeasible. Therefore, leverage multiple redundant clouds to eliminate this failure.
CliQr CloudCenter helps the organization in this area. It offers cross-cloud disaster recovery for private clouds by duplicating all the data and switching over to other private clouds. CliQr’s data syncing and cloud-agnostic Application Profiles lets the one-click-and-switch cold DR features to any of CliQr’s supported public cloud. This option is also proven useful in a scenario where all private cloud sites are taken down simultaneously.
4. Testing
It is always recommended to begin a multicloud disaster recovery strategy using a small and limited-scope test project. Some enterprises use this technology by duplicating a certain number of data sets in a supplementary area using multiple cloud provider services. Once done, they evaluate the outcome, and, if it warrants it, they move on to critical assets.
Therefore, remember that a DR plan without appropriate testing is not a well-thought DR plan. One has to regularly test all the DR strategies to ensure your system works well even when things go wrong.
5. Regular Drills
In today’s digitized world, both the multicloud technologies and provider requirements evolve continuously. Hence, regularly running drills of multicloud DR plans are essential to ensure flat and swift failovers. With this approach, you can learn how various function performs even in the event of a disaster.
As testing targets and assesses separate segments, a drill goes through the whole technique from the starting point as far as possible. DR drills closely simulate how your system will be used following any problem or disaster. If in case, you are not happy with the outcome, you can work with the cloud providers to rectify it at the earliest.
Conclusion
Multicloud scenario is the biggest key to success in data protection and disaster recovery. It ensures you have accessibility to all your data, no matter where it is stored or how the challenges impact it. Therefore, pick a right DR strategy for at least the critical pieces of infrastructure across various cloud providers, if not a complete and wholly automated system.
