Cloud Computing and Business Continuity: Where and When Should You ...

Cloud Computing
[EKIMEEZA TECHNEWS] -IT plays a fundamental role in most organizations? day-to-day activities, underpinning how they achieve their objectives and go about their business. If and when those IT services are not available, the organization can come to a grinding halt. The discipline of business continuity provides enterprises with the planning and tools necessary to protect themselves against these problems ? everything from large disaster events such as fires or floods, to smaller IT problems such as lost data or broken servers.

IT itself is also in transition: The ?new model? of cloud computing is being adopted with the vision of making services to the business more flexible and cost effective. Around business continuity, the cloud has the potential to make backup and recovery available to a wider section of the market, providing advanced level functionality that is aimed at the enterprise while still keeping costs low enough for all companies to benefit.

The main question around backup, recovery and the cloud is whether this approach can fulfill its early promise, and how it can work for companies.

Understanding Recovery
To answer this question, organizations need to examine the basics of disaster recovery (DR) and continuity planning. This means understanding three things:

How up to date the organization?s data has to be, and how much data it can stand to lose. This is the Recovery Point Objective (RPO);

How quickly the organization wants to be back up and running after any disaster. This is the Recovery Time Objective (RTO); and

How much control the organization has to retain over its data. For example, can the company move information over to a third party, or does it have to remain internal? Can data leave the country or region boundaries?

Depending on the market in which they work, the regulations surrounding their industry, and the budget they have available, each business will have to define different RTO and RPO goals.

European organizations will have different challenges as well. For example, in the UK finance sector, the Financial Services Authority and the British Bankers? Association have issued guidance and templates for business continuity: The FSA?s Business Continuity Management Practice Guide states that critical data should be recovered within one hour from an off-site location and that critical IT systems at the company?s main site can be recovered within two hours of invocation. However, these systems do not have to be owned by the company, and can be brought in as needed. This makes cloud DR a potential avenue for these companies to explore.

For French and German companies, however, the rules are much stricter: For example, information cannot go outside the national borders. However, this is not to say that a local cloud services provider could not provide a DR service to businesses in different countries; but it does mean that each customer would need guarantees from the service provider that information would remain within that data centre. Full Public cloud services would have to be discounted if they could not match these guarantees.

Knowing The Pain Points
The traditional approach to DR requires full stand-by equipment at an off-site location with the necessary software and configuration to quickly transfer users and data. However, the upfront investment and complexity around deployments often means that customers discount DR unless there is a severe penalty for not having a solution in place. Often, these organizations are relying on tape backups or hoping that they don?t get hit by a failure.

The cloud offers an approach that either removes or reduces much of the potential costs associated with DR: This makes it possible to overcome the first objection that many companies have. Cloud computing in general offers a route around the problem of cost, as the back-end IT infrastructure belongs to another company and the infrastructure or service is delivered through a web portal.

Data can be copied over to a cloud storage provider rather than sitting at a second site, and all that is paid for is the amount of resources consumed. Cloud services providers can also provide more than just online storage. The cloud can provide computing capacity as well as storage, so the data can be manipulated and processed remotely as well. This solves the second major issue that companies have with DR: instead of being an insurance policy against a disaster, it can provide a direct business benefit through improved productivity and reduced downtime.

The other main benefit from cloud is that the organization should not have to sign up to a long-term commitment: if a better deal is available from a different cloud provider, then the organization should be able to migrate its data and resources over. Ensuring that you are not locked into a specific cloud service and its tool-sets should be one of the first questions that you ask.

When Cloud Recovery Makes Sense
For smaller companies, where the cost of DR was too high, a cloud-based approach can provide better RTO and RPO in an affordable way. For larger organizations, cloud can complement their existing continuity strategy by increasing the number of machines that are protected at the same cost. It can also offer another location for data to be stored in the unlikely event of multiple sites being affected.

One of the largest issues for business continuity is not just protecting data, but also the recovery process involved. Cutting the amount of downtime experienced during the recovery phase is an essential consideration when determining the approach to take when choosing a cloud services provider to work with, and making comparisons has to be based on ?apples-to-apples? situations. For example, the recovery time involved with cloud storage compared to a cloud recovery service has to be based on the time taken to move physical assets. Many cloud storage vendors simply ship a DVD or set of disks with your data on them, and the recovery still has to be carried out.

Conversely, cloud recovery involves running the application workload in the cloud during any disaster affecting the main site. This approach does require that technical resources are available from the cloud provider, such as the ability to handle larger boot volumes as well as the scale to cope with multiple workloads being booted and run at the same time. However, it circumvents the problem of lost time while any data is recovered. This option to work with an up-to-date copy of their data and applications reduces the potential window of downtime, by shrinking the RTO for users to get back online and remain productive.

Using the cloud as a platform to protect your business is a new option, one that will become more commonly adopted as organizations shift their models for IT across to running on operational expenditure rather than capital investment. However, understanding the traditional skills around setting RTO and RPO values is still essential for DR strategies to be successful.

Are Organizations Ready For Cloud Recovery?
One of the biggest challenges surrounding cloud computing at the moment is knowing what questions to ask and how to understand the language that service providers are using to describe their offerings. Here are six questions that can help any organization define its requirements:

Can the cloud service protect all of the company?s servers and applications?

At what level does the service work? Does it protect the OS and applications as well as the data?

How do you recover the data/servers? Can this be done without lots of downtime?

Can I actually failover to the Cloud and keep systems up and running?

Can I test the failover process to ensure that the process works?

Can I pay only for what I use or do I need dedicated servers in the cloud?

What business continuity processes does the service provider have in place to protect their data centers?

By Ian Masters is the UK sales director at Vision Solutions (Irvine, CA). www.visionsolutions.com

Source: http://www.ekimeeza.com/?p=2804

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