Benefits of Cloud

Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery (DR) refers to the ability of your systems and services to continue operating, or be recovered, in response to a service-affecting outage or event.

Challenge

Organisations generally view disaster recovery as a burden on operational teams and a cost overhead on service provision.

As it stands, organisations ensure service availability by duplicating services and infrastructure across multiple environments (a hot/cold model). This approach also duplicates service costs.

The challenge is: 'How we can cost-effectively meet service availability requirement without significant investment in infrastructure or facilities?'

Benefits

Cloud platforms are based on highly resilient architectures with redundancy incorporated at every level. In most cases, providers operate with an SLA of 99.9%, rising to 99.999999999% (eleven nines) for some services.

This level of availability exceeds the capabilities of most organisations, where costs constraints and geographical limitations hamper their ability to deliver required service levels, even in common failure scenarios, such as datacentre power and cooling failures.

Using public cloud services introduces several benefits:

• stable platform: the redundant and resilient nature of hyper-scale cloud platforms provides immediate improvements in availability for organisations who currently struggle to meet service levels
• service-specific availability: using public cloud technologies enables your organisation to set availability requirements at the service level, rather than at an infrastructure level. This gives you more granular control over how particular services should respond in the event of a failure at different levels (host, datacentre, region, etc.)
• minimal maintenance: cloud services – particularly Software- and Platform-as-a-Service models – provide high-availability without the burden associated with managing duplicated infrastructures
• reduced costs: cloud service models provide high-availability more cost-effectively by reducing the need for duplicated hosting environments