Making Disaster Recovery Irrelevant

Posted February 25th, 2017

By:  Marcelo Oliveira, Director Datacenter, Infrastructure, and Continuity Solutions Nope. If you move your applications to the cloud, you are not making disaster recovery irrelevant. I have heard over and over people saying: “I don’t need disaster recovery, my applications are on the cloud” That is not entirely true. You should review the terms of your contract. More likely than not, you have your workloads running in one specific datacenter that could fail. Also very likely, if you are not paying extra for data backup, it is not being done. Snapshots are not backup. If you are accessing your applications from VMs running on IaaS / PaaS (hopefully SaaS providers take care of their DR, but don’t trust their sales reps. Ask) services via internet VPN or one single “express link,” you are also subject to lengthy periods of time when people are breathing on your neck while you scramble to get the systems back online. Agree? Disaster Recovery becomes irrelevant when you use an ITaaS platform that delivers multiple interconnected datacenters that allow you to select the RPO / RTO combination that you need, per application and you are not penalized for actually using different environments for tests, auditing, maintenance, etc. There is an old saying in Brazil, that translates to something like: “whatever is previously negotiated is at a fair price.” The issue facing IT decision makers these days is making moves based on cloud face-value prices to find out, after the fact, that DR arrangements are their responsibilities, and they will have to disburse unplanned money to pay for it. Telecommunication providers are on a privileged position to provide such services (not all of them get it right). One of our clients needed to transfer 30TB of data. Try this tool: http://www.calctool.org/CALC/prof/computing/transfer_time. 30TB of data over 100mbps. Then try the same 30TB over 4gbps. Quite a difference, huh? You should not have to worry whether or not your organization’s critical IT systems are protected. You just have to make sure they are before you run into issues in production. Talk to a strong Solutions Architect with lots of experience bringing orgs back from the dead. Even better, with hands-on death prevention stories to tell. I know some of these people.