Physical to Virtual Disaster Recovery Planning: Considerations for the Cloud

How's your disaster recovery planning these days?

If you’re reading this, it’s pretty safe to assume that either you or someone in your organization is “tuned in” enough to have well documented DR plans that enable your company's business operations to continue in the face of a significant loss of technologies, facilities or human life. And they’re testing these plans at some regular interval (once each quarter, once a year, etc.) based on internal business impact analyses, or external regulatory requirements. Right?

Now, has your disaster recovery planning been adjusted to take into account the virtualization and cloud computing initiatives that are more than likely either currently being talked about, or actually implemented, by your IT architects, or the vendors that manage your IT environments? Probably not.

How many of you did I lose with "How's your disaster recovery planning these days?" Hopefully not many. But how many of you did I lose at the first mention of virtual, or cloud recovery planning? From what I’ve been seeing and hearing from our customers, I’d be willing to bet more than a few of you.

A traditional physical-to-physical disaster recovery strategy is wrought with challenges like being able to move to another data center in a reasonable time frame, always having contracts in place with that alternate data center, reliance on a single managed service provider with geographic and organizational redundancy that won’t go out of business without warning…just to name a few. Good governance and risk management practices within your infrastructure, asset and vendor management processes are always a best-practice approach to help mitigate and control these risks to the business.

Now imagine the physical-to-virtual challenges in the development of data backup routines that move data out of the primary data center (and out of the control of the entity running that data center) and into a virtual IT environment. Cloud computing can definitely help address these challenges by serving as an important foundation for rapid recovery with a low amount of data loss. Imagine, for example, regularly synchronizing your production environments with a virtual environment that packages the data regularly for DR deployment in the event of a disaster. Assuming you’ve set up machine images that mirror your production environments, you should be able to rapidly recover into the cloud without paying to run an entirely redundant data center 24x7.

Security is quickly becoming a major concern when setting up these environment and their related DR processes, and RSA is actively participating as part of the Cloud Security Alliance to ensure that through EMC, RSA and other products, safe cloud computing can address newly emerging threats to the cloud, as well as incident response within the cloud. Be sure to check out the RSA web site for more information.

Security aside, here are a few more key components to ensure that you too can achieve effective DR in your cloud computing environment:

* Set up procedures for synchronizing data with tools that package the data regularly for DR deployment (and don’t forget about data encryption!)
* Create machine images that have the same operating system, tools, core applications, and libraries as your production systems
* Use the appropriate set of tools to configure your DR environment to automate your required DR processes
* Regularly test restoring your infrastructure based on the current data in your cloud environment and validate the success of the event

The main benefit of this approach is that you simply know your DR system will work for you in the same manner that it did for you in your physical environment, while reducing computing and resource costs to your organization.

Where is your organization these days with regards to ensuring DR capabilities within your cloud? Let me know, and I promise to keep everyone updated on the great work being done within the industry!