A bit more than a year ago, Hurricane Sandy made land fall on the NYC metropolitan area. The storm, as you might remember, flooded downtown Manhattan and caused massive damage to southern New Jersey. Part of the destruction caused by the storm was felt by data center facilities located in lower Manhattan. With their location and placement, the Hudson River flooded multiple Cloud based data center facilities causing many businesses to experience unwanted downtime.
While no one wants to admit that a natural disaster can occur in their backyard, the truth is hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes and the like happen all the time. As a Cloud hosting firm, it is up to you to protect your clients Cloud hosting servers against downtime by investing in instant and secure disaster recovery solutions.
Here’s how it should be done.
Instant Data Replication
As a consumer, you invest in Cloud hosting solutions. Those Cloud hosting solutions are housed in a secure data center located in relative proximity to your business location. You choose your Cloud hosting provider because their data center proximity to you limits latency rates and lags in service. However, when it comes to Cloud Hosting disaster recovery, your provider needs to supply you with a backup data center facility which is not only located outside of your local business area, it is located a few hundred miles, if not a few thousand miles, away. This is done for a reason.
Disaster recovery in Cloud hosting is about avoiding disaster. The later section, recovery, is about ensuring your solutions are up and running once disaster strikes however disaster is about the ability of your provider to see around the corner to protect you from downtime caused by an earthquake. This protection means operating an auxiliary backup data center facility which your provider uses to instantly replicate your Cloud server data to. With constant data replication to a backup Cloud computing data center facility, if your Cloud hosting firms first data center fails due to a Hurricane Sandy like event, your Cloud hosting provider can have your already backed up server located in a data center facility a world away up and running without issue or downtime.
Within an industry like Cloud hosting, which makes it a prominent point of notice to constantly mention 99.9999% uptime service solutions, a good Cloud hosting disaster recovery plan should be looked at as a necessary with any Cloud server firm.
Provisioning a New Cloud Server
Another aspect of Cloud Disaster Recovery comes in the form of the ability of a consumer to provision a new server from a backed up Cloud disaster recovery server. Most providers supply some sort of instant provisioning for a new Cloud server from a backed up box. It isn’t uncommon to find Cloud hosting companies offer the following disaster recovery-provisioning plan:
- All backups of current data are kept for a four day period
- On the fifth day, the oldest backup is deleted and is replaced with the newest backup
- Backups are incremental. A full backup is taken than anytime new data is added to a Cloud hosting server, the backup is incrementally backed up.
- Capacity limit. Disaster recovery is offered in GB’s. Consumers can backup their server with the capacity of 0 – 400 GB’s. Anything over that won’t be backed up.
- At anytime, Cloud hosting consumers can spin up a new server from a backup.
Generally speaking, Cloud hosting providers will offer some variety of the backup-provisioning plan mentioned above. Although the specifics might change from Cloud hosting server firm to Cloud hosting server firm, every provider should offer the disaster recovery.
If they don’t, do not waste your money or time with them. Remember, this is your business. You take it seriously, so should your Cloud hosting supplier.