Benefits of the Cloud in Disaster Recovery

Under current pricing schemes, cloud based DR services
will not see much benefit when used for applications that
require true “hot” standby servers since this can significantly
raise the cost during normal operation. However,
for applications that can tolerate recovery times on the
order of 200 seconds (a typical VM startup time in the
EC2 cloud), substantial savings can be found by utilizing
low cost servers while replicating state in ordinary conditions
and powerful ones only after a disaster occurs.
Cloud DR services may be able to obtain additional economic
benefits by multiplexing a single replication server
for multiple applications, further lowering the cost of resources
under normal operation. For applications with a

loose RPO, the cloud can provide even greater benefits by
only initiating the replication service a few times a day to
create periodic backups.
Cloud computing can facilitate disaster recovery by
significantly lowering costs:
The cloud’s pay-as-you go pricing model significantly
lowers costs due to the different level of resources
required before and during a disaster.
Cloud resources can quickly be added with fine
granularity and have costs that scale smoothly without
requiring large upfront investments.
The cloud platform manages and maintains the DR
servers and storage devices, lowering IT costs and
reducing the impact of failures at the disaster site.
The benefits of virtualization, while not necessarily
specific to cloud platforms, still provide important features
for disaster recovery:
VM startup can be easily automated, lowering recovery
times after a disaster.
Virtualization eliminates hardware dependencies,
potentially lowering hardware requirements at the
backup site.
Application agnostic state replication software can
be run outside of the VM, treating it as a black box.
These characteristics can simplify the replication and deployment
of resources in a cloud DR site, and enable
business continuity by reducing recovery times