Disaster Recovery from the Cloud: Explained
Recovering the virtual instances that make up your applications from the cloud is an essential part of modern business continuity strategies. Cloud recovery ensures that businesses can quickly restore operations after data loss, ransomware attacks, or unplanned disruptions. By leveraging advanced disaster recovery solutions designed for the cloud, organizations can achieve seamless recovery with minimal downtime. This guide explores the tools, methods, and best practices for successful cloud recovery and the importance of proactive planning.
What Is Cloud Recovery?
Cloud recovery refers to the process of retrieving data stored in the cloud after a disruption, such as hardware failures, cyberattacks, or natural disasters. Using cloud disaster recovery services, organizations can quickly restore critical workloads, applications, and databases to resume operations. Cloud recovery typically involves automated failover mechanisms, ensuring minimal impact on end users and business processes.
Understanding Key Recovery Metrics
Recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) are two of the most important metrics of any disaster recovery plan. They refer to data loss and recovery time for data and applications in the event of a disaster—whether on-premises or an outage in a region hosting cloud resources.
RTOs and RPOs measure the effectiveness of disaster recovery (DR). They are expressed in units of time (days, hours, minutes). Lower values—shorter periods of time—are more desirable.
RTO represents the amount of downtime that can be expected before operations, including data and application services, are back online following a disruption. RTO may be influenced by many factors, including the level of manual vs. automated recovery processes such as boot ordering of virtual instances, redirecting network traffic, and recovering application stacks consistently
RPO measures data loss in a disaster recovery scenario. It refers to the most recent point in time when a known, good copy of data is available to recover a system. The further back in time a recovery point exists, the more data is lost. RPO is often determined by the data protection solution used, such as backups, storage replication, or continuous data replication.
In Figure 1 below, the RTO is 4 hours (from 1:05 to 5:05 p.m.). Since the disruption occurred at 1:05 p.m., and the last data copy was taken at 10:00 a.m., the RPO is three hours and five minutes.
Types of Recovery Clouds
When choosing a cloud-based disaster recovery approach, organizations typically consider the following types of recovery clouds:
Private Cloud
A private cloud offers dedicated resources and greater control over data recovery. It’s ideal for industries with stringent compliance requirements or businesses managing highly sensitive information.
Hybrid Cloud
Combining private and public cloud environments, a hybrid cloud enables businesses to balance cost efficiency with scalability. This is a popular choice for companies looking to optimize their cloud backup disaster recovery strategies.
Public Cloud
The public cloud provides scalability and cost savings. Leading public cloud providers offer tools for disaster recovery in the cloud, making it a viable option for businesses with flexible workloads.
Importance of a Robust Cloud Data Recovery Plan
A comprehensive cloud disaster recovery plan is essential for minimizing downtime and preventing data loss. Businesses can prepare for various scenarios—including cyberattacks, hardware failures, and natural disasters—by leveraging cloud disaster recovery services and testing their recovery strategies regularly.
Key elements of a cloud recovery plan include:
- Assessing critical workloads and recovery priorities.
- Ensuring frequent backups with low RPOs.
- Implementing disaster recovery cloud solutions to automate failover and failback processes.
For more guidance, explore the Zerto disaster recovery guide.
FAQ about Cloud Recovery
Can cloud data be recovered?
Yes, cloud data can be recovered from cloud sites back on-premises or in between cloud regions. Using specific cloud disaster recovery solutions, businesses can restore lost or damaged data from backup files stored in the cloud. Recovery tools and techniques vary depending on the service provider and the level of protection implemented.
What is a cloud recovery site?
A cloud recovery site is a secondary environment hosted in the cloud to replicate and store critical business data and applications. In the event of a failure, the cloud recovery site becomes operational, enabling rapid failover and business continuity.
By investing in the right cloud DR tools and services, businesses can safeguard their operations and recover data with confidence. Discover more about Zerto continuous data protection and our approach to cloud disaster recovery to keep your organization protected.
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Are you ready to get started with recovering from the cloud with Zerto? Read more here.
Anthony Dutra 
