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TuxCare BlogDisaster Recovery in a Hybrid Cloud Environment: Strategies for Success
by Nazy Fouladirad
November 7, 2024 - Guest Writer
Cloud deployments have become increasingly common for modern-day companies. They offer the flexibility and cost-effectiveness businesses need to scale their operations while keeping their operations agile to changing needs.
Moving to the cloud is also highly accessible, with multiple options available for businesses to customize where and how they manage their deployments. This includes maintaining hybrid architectures that leverage both on-premise and cloud-based applications and services.
However, when managing hybrid cloud environments, many challenges come with managing security initiatives across multiple platforms. If a major disruption occurs, such as during a cyber breach or wide-scale outage, planning and executing disaster recovery initiatives can be much more complicated.
Thankfully, there are several strategies you can use to ensure your disaster recovery initiatives stay effective, regardless of how your cloud deployments are configured.
1. Assess Your Hybrid Cloud Environment
Running a business in the cloud allows you to quickly adjust where and how to expand your operations. Although this gives you the flexibility needed to innovate products and service availability, you can also quickly lose track of how all your resources are provisioned.
Lack of visibility can cause issues when planning your disaster recovery processes. Regularly evaluating and understanding all the elements of your cloud environments is what gives you the transparency you need to put the right protections in place.
Part of this process involves identifying the systems most essential to continuing operations and supporting revenue streams. If these systems or their supporting protocols ever become compromised, you’ll want to ensure their quick restoration is one of the highest priorities.
2. Define Your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
When outlining your disaster recovery priorities across a hybrid cloud structure, you’ll first need to identify your RTO and RPO.
What is RTO?
Recovery time objectives outline the maximum allowable downtime your business can experience for each mission-critical application or service. If the amount of downtime experienced goes past this point, it can start leading to significant implications for your business.
In most cases, your RTOs will be designed based on the potential financial impact associated with them. This can be either due to the operational disruption itself or even less tangible elements like reputational damage.
What is RPO?
Your recovery point objective defines the limit of data leakage you can experience. The industry may stipulate this based on what your business is in, but it can also be an internal target based on the business type.
3. Implement Backup Solutions
Your data integrity is critical for sustaining your business. Keeping it protected before, during, and after a major disruption is important and requires a strategic approach when operating in a hybrid cloud environment.
One of the ways you make sure your data integrity always remains intact is by implementing effective backup solutions. This includes:
- Diversifying Backup Locations – The beauty of using hybrid cloud deployments is that you have multiple options when storing your backups. It’s important to use this flexibility since diversifying your backup locations is the safest method for ensuring you always have access to data in the event that another system or network becomes compromised.
- Using Data Replication – One way you can minimize any data loss during a disruption is by activating real-time or near-real-time data replication. This process runs continuously in the background, syncing databases automatically with backup locations to make it much easier to recover operations with minimal downtime.
- Regularly Testing Your Backups – Although data replication is highly valuable, it’s important not to fully trust all data protection protocols you have in place. You’ll also want to regularly test your backup solutions to make sure they’re performing the way they should should you ever need to rely on them in the future.
4. Leverage Orchestration Tools
When your systems and applications are distributed across multiple cloud environments, automating the coordination of backup procedures and coordinating failovers is critical. The great thing is there are many different orchestration tools available that can help you streamline this activity.
Automating Your Failover Processes
The more your business scales, the harder it is for teams to stay on top of all the necessary components of maintaining cloud resources – especially those required to minimize cloud disruptions. AI-driven orchestration tools provide automated solutions for managing failover processes.
During an outage, these tools will automatically switch over backup systems when issues are detected across your entire cloud infrastructure. This significantly speeds up recovery times and allows teams to focus on other important tasks.
Managing Complex Recovery Protocols
Orchestration tools help to simplify recovery protocols in complicated cloud deployments. All your necessary recovery applications, resources, and configurations can all be consolidated in one place and managed using predefined dependencies. This helps recovery teams respond quicker during a disaster response and helps to minimize errors during the process.
5. Prioritize Security and Compliance
Another major consideration for businesses when it comes to their disaster recovery efforts is security and compliance. This is rarely an easy process since it can include everything from implementing strict access controls and multi-factor authentication protocols to conducting regular security assessments.
Encryption technology is another important element of data security. Making sure your data is secured both at rest and in transit across your entire cloud infrastructure helps keep your data protected even if a successful breach takes place.
These initiatives are essential to maintain data security and compliance relevant to all regulations and industry standards. Depending on your industry and the type of data you handle, this could involve following HIPAA or PCI DSS regulatory requirements or staying within strict guidelines according to operational frameworks like HITRUST.
6. Choose the Right Cloud Provider
Your ability to recover successfully from major operational disruptions will be based in part on the type of cloud provider relationships you’ve built. It’s important to make sure you’re working with reliable partners who take your business seriously and have the right procedures in place to minimize your downtime when handling data recovery efforts.
Some of the things to look for in a cloud provider include:
- Proven Track Record – It’s important to only work with a provider who has experience managing disaster recovery processes, especially with clients in your industry. Reviewing your cloud provider’s service level agreements, specifically in areas that highlight how they handle outages or wider-scale issues like cyberattacks, is critical to make sure they’re in alignment with your own business needs.
- Comprehensive Disaster Recovery Offerings – Not all cloud providers have the same tools or solutions for managing disaster recovery initiatives effectively. Have a look at your provider’s list of offerings to see if they provide Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) options. DRaaS can make your recovery much more streamlined by providing pre-built infrastructure, automated failover mechanisms, and expert support to guide you through the recovery process.
- High Availability – Place a higher priority on providers that offer more diversity when it comes to the regions they support. Distributing your resources across different locations minimizes the impact of outages only seen in certain areas and ensures you’re able to get higher server availability for your critical applications.
Manage Your Disaster Recovery Efforts Effectively
Managing a hybrid cloud environment can be highly beneficial for your business, but due diligence is required to ensure your disaster recovery plans stay effective. By following the strategies discussed, you’ll make sure that you’re leveraging all of the tools available to you to mitigate the impact of major disruptions and create more resilience in your operations.
Author Bio Information
Author Bio:
Nazy Fouladirad is President and COO of Tevora, a global leading cybersecurity consultancy. She has dedicated her career to creating a more secure business and online environment for organizations across the country and world. She is passionate about serving her community and acts as a board member for a local nonprofit organization.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nazy-fouladirad-67a66821
