Why disaster recovery and backup are crucial in today's cloud era

No business expects to experience a major loss of data, but because the unexpected happens, the safest thing is to plan for the worst and hope for the best. Even the most cautious and prepared organization can experience things like power or hardware failures, viral attacks, natural disasters, and the most common cause of downtime, plain human error. This is why data backups and replication, as part of a disaster recovery strategy are so important.

There are two main kinds of data protection services companies should incorporate into their long-term business plans. The first kind is a data backup, which copies data from a primary location (the company’s mainframe or server) to a secondary location (a data center or disc drive).

"This service delivers the ability for extremely high recovery rates for IT protection," said Chris Pierdominici, senior product marketing manager for RapidScale. "It protects people’s data, applications and virtualized infrastructure with a cloud target and recovery, as opposed to more traditional means like on-premises data centers."

Organizations that use backup and replication services save both time and money when they experience any kind of data loss.

"We encourage companies to follow something called the 3-2-1 rule," said Robert Bergman, senior lead product manager at RapidScale. "This means you should have three copies of backup on two different media types, and at least one needs to be offsite. You want to have three copies to restore from in case you have a major data loss."

At minimum, companies should perform regular backups of primary and secondary services and data. However, backups might not always be enough. Backup data offers snapshots from limited windows of time and has been known to become corrupted. On-premises backups can also be vulnerable to ransomware and virus attacks. Additionally, backups require more time to restore from than DRaaS.

"If you have IT applications and you’re using backup methodologies on-premises or in the cloud, those can take many hours, days, or weeks to bring whatever the protected aspect is back into operation," said Pierdominici. "If you have systems you need to get back online, backup is not going to serve you."

Pierdominici recommends backup as a protection method for secondary resources that could go down without affecting daily business operations. DRaaS, on the other hand, is a method of backing up primary services that are mission critical.

"DRaaS allows you to fail over to your replicated environment on the cloud within minutes and begin recovery of critical elements within hours," said Pierdominici. "You can bring that online and then, in the backend, you can be working to figure out what happened to your principal environment and assess when it may be ready to fail back to."

With RapidScale, business operations can be run directly from the cloud for up to 30 days before paying an egress fee of data stored there and which a business would like to recover back to the site of the downtime event. Sometimes businesses decide they want to move their operations to the cloud permanently.

"We have a very flexible, people-focused service model," said Bergman. "We can work with you and fully manage, co-manage, or you manage and we support. We also have guided implementation. We help you implement and configure every step of the way. We can help you integrate our cloud backup component with an on-premises server. As you make configuration changes, that’s all included."

Customers can manage their accounts through a comprehensive customer portal.

"If you fail over to our cloud environment, you can use the portal to determine what you have running in the cloud," said Bergman. "It’s a full self-service portal, and it doesn’t just give visibility — it also allows you to manage your environment with us."

When the primary servers are repaired, the transition from cloud back to normal daily operations can happen seamlessly. Additionally, RapidScale responds swiftly to concerns and feedback with a 24/7 help line providing technical support, said Bergman.

"We have some of the industry’s leading customer service satisfaction scores," said Pierdominici. "We average 4.8 out of 5 with our customers."