The Real Disaster: Three Reasons Why DR to the Cloud Can Fail ...

Words by: Ziv Kedem

1. The replication technologies used by your Cloud Service Provider may slow down your IT environment.
   Many replication technologies utilize snapshots to make a copies of data, slowing production environments and taking resources from your critical applications and systems. Disaster Recovery, as important as it is, should not hinder your critical business systems.
2. Most Cloud service providers charge for bandwidth utilized to send data to their Cloud, resulting in a costly expense.
   Many replication solutions do not have built-in compression and network optimization tools. Replication without compression can become quite costly, as network costs are often quoted by service providers on a per-GB (gigabyte) basis.
3. Your service provider?s Cloud-based replication site needs to work with your existing storage and technologies.

Currently, Cloud service providers need to offer the same storage and technologies as their customers in order to serve as a replication and recovery site. If you and your Cloud provider are using different storage and technologies, the process of replicating data to their cloud can be costly and involve some complex, manual processes.

What can you do to make sure your company does not fall victim to failures in these key areas?

1. Avoid snapshots and other replication technologies that tax production.
   A disaster recovery solution should be simple, automated and have zero impact on your business systems and applications. Be sure to have an automated mechanism for testing your DR solution as well, so that you can run regular checks of your protected data. Data protection and tests of your DR system should never impact the applications running in your data center.
2. Find a replication solution with built-in bandwidth compression.
   Compression is key to low bandwidth utilization and keeping costs down. Find a provider that works with you to keep network utilization down, by compressing replication data and helping you to prioritize the data that is most important to you. Some providers even have tools to help keep the data protection setup costs down, in order to avoid a costly hit to the network when setting up your replication solution.
3. Make sure your Cloud provider can work with any storage technologies.
   Your Cloud provider will need to offer the ability to mix storage from any vendor using any technology, so that your data and the data of all of their many customers can be protected in their Cloud. Make sure they are set up to do this, otherwise you?ll end up paying for them to upgrade their storage technology to match yours. Plus, if the Cloud provider can only work with one storage vendor, that locks you to a specific vendor in your data center for the full duration of your Cloud contract. Make sure your provider can support any storage vendor, so you have the freedom to upgrade or change vendors in your data center without disrupting your Cloud DR plan.

Disaster Recovery to the Cloud is a big opportunity for SMBs, offering secure, automated, and low-cost data replication and recovery. Simply knowing what to ask your Cloud provider will make the selection of DR services simple and effective.

About the Author:

Ziv Kedem is co-founder and CEO of Zerto, a company providing disaster recovery and business continuity solutions for virtualized data centers and Cloud environments.

Source: http://thecloudmagazine.com/real-disaster-reasons-dr-cloud-fail/

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