As we all know, the current situation of COVID-19 has made a massive impact on the Business of various industries and individuals. With the current pandemic situation globally, we as an IT business are responsible for taking appropriate measures to ensure everyone’s safety and as well ensure the Business continues as usual.

This results in limited employees available on-premises/office locations to take care of daily Business as usual activities to maintain IT and business continuity such as Datacenters, Office Networking, Active Directory services, Hardware and Appliances and more, which form key components of IT infrastructure and form backbone of business continuity.

But as we all know, no IT systems are 100% available and disaster-free. Emergencies can happen, systems can go down due to various factors such as an increase in load, power failure, hardware failure, climatic extremities and more. During these scenarios, it is also not very feasible or easy to scale up traditional IT infrastructure. But we as a business cannot take this as a reason to stop functioning and impact Business and customers. Hence business continuity and disaster (BC/DR) solutions form a critical component to ensure Business continues in case of any disaster. These ensure operational resilience in the event of any interruptions or failures.

To address the problem stated above, we would need to have a robust and cost-effective BC/DR strategy in place, which brings us to the point on how cloud services can be used as an effective BC/DR strategy solution.

Cloud service providers render more flexible service offerings which help us to minimize cost and maximize benefits.

We can make use of a variety of services such as backup solutions, traffic management, infrastructure as a Code, gives the ability to ramp up the infrastructure quickly, in a BC/DR scenario giving end-user full and seamless performance to end-user.

Customers can also use cloud offerings such as dedicated network connections, cloud-based directory, DNS services, storage services to have faster connectivity, resolution and Resilience which can help in reducing network delays, increased response times and data availability.

With Cloud Services, we also have an additional benefit of Pay-per-Use, which helps us to minimize cost and expenditure on DR infrastructure.

Before considering Cloud Services as a BC/DR solution, any organization need to have an impact analysis to understand and establish key objectives such as:

• RTOs: Recovery Time Objective
• RPOs: Recovery Point Objective
• DR strategy

Once the above parameters are defined, we can investigate various cloud models to help continuously deliver dependable infrastructure.

Few well-known cloud models that help in BC/DR strategies are listed below.

1. Hot site or active/active setup

This might be an expensive option, and a hot website/a perennially operational site would be required. But this gives an advantage of very minimal downtime and seamless business continuity.

2. Warm or cold site active/passive thisscenario, we will have the same amount of resources provisioned on the Cloud but will be in a standby mode (powered off), during the disaster, we can quickly bring up the resources online and serve workloads.

The solution also helps in cost savings as we can make use of Pay as You Go model, in which we will be paying for services only when in use. This might have a smaller downtime as the cold site needs to be online before catering workloads.

3. Workload-based disaster recovery or business continuity

Might not span the entire infrastructure but only needs to target certain mission-critical services or applications. This is a very cost-effective solution as only critical applications will be hosted on the Cloud, and we will pay for minimal resources on the Cloud.

4. Backup-based recovery

This solution can be used for scenarios where there is no possibility of auto-healing and service downtime can be afforded up to a certain extent. Applications are still considered necessary for bringing up quickly without any business impact, adhering to the clearly defined backup policies when mentioned.

We can use solutions like storage gateway to regularly backup data from on premise/ enterprise architecture onto the Cloud, which helps us in recovery in case of On-Prem failures. This process is a bit slower and depends on various factors as Network Bandwidth/CSPs SLA and more.

High-Level Benefits of Cloud-Based BC/DR vs Traditional Approaches

Some of the key benefits of using a reliable, highly available cloud-based service for BC/DR of systems include:

• Effectively Unlimited Scalability: As it is well known, cloud services offer unlimited elasticity and scalability on infrastructure, which helps us leverage this and scale up the resources on-demand whenever there is a need. This is very challenging when it comes to traditional IT infrastructure.
• Cost-Effective: Consumers pay only for the service what they use. This helps to use cloud options and minimize cost on DR strategies effectively.
• Availability and Resilience: with multiple options available on the Cloud such as Multi-Availability Zone, Multi-Region, Auto-Scaling and we need not worry about availability and resiliency of infrastructure residing on the Cloud.
• Faster Provisioning/De-Provisioning: Provisioning and de-provisioning of infrastructure on Cloud is easy and can be automated. This gives a very great advantage of faster infrastructure provisioning/de-provisioning during/after the DR scenario.
• No (Minimal) Systems BC/DR Expertise Required: There is a noticeable reduction in the effort and the skill required from the consumer when compared to the traditional BC/DR processes. This is even more valid for
•  data recovery, and redundancy for cloud-based systems as the CSP will make sure that the automated fail-over practices exist for protecting their systems.

Security on Cloud

One of the major concerns for any IT industry is security and especially when it is not hosted on your environment, such as a public cloud.

• Any cloud service provider, we have a shared responsibility model, when cloud service providers are responsible for securing the backend IT infrastructure and Customers are responsible for securing their applications, VMs and more.
• In cloud infrastructure is already complaint with various industry-based Security standards such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA, ISO and more. Cloud Service Providers also offer various services which help the customer to secure their data residing on cloud infrastructure.
• Can make use of services such as encryption with CMKs, vaults such as secrets-managers to encrypt and protect the data.
• Options are also available to proactively monitor compliance and security of cloud infrastructure with various multiple services. E.g., AWS Config, AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS WAF, Security Groups on AWS, Azure Security Center on Azure, Cloud Armor on Google are few examples to highlight.
• Logging, monitoring and alerting solutions help as an audit mechanism to observe anomalies on Cloud and automatically remediate possible ones through automated mechanisms.

Rounding up:

The Cloud, armed with better replication, stronger resilience, faster provisioning and perennial support, can be an impressive platform for our DR strategy, keeping cost in mind and ensuring seamless business run for end-users and customers.

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