Cloud Disaster Recovery Best Practices
The trend of using cloud storage is rapidly increasing across the various companies. The cloud delivers scalability, security and flexibility that were often out of reach for businesses just a few years ago. However, like every other technology, it also offers a few limitations.
Imagine a critical software update going wrong or a phishing attack leading to a data breach, these scenarios are infrequent but still can occur and create substantial disruptions for a company lacking proper preparation and knowledge.
Cloud Disaster Recovery plays a vital role in this context. In the below article, we’ll dive into the reasons why businesses need cloud disaster recovery and strategies you can use to ensure your data remains safe and reliable.
What Is Cloud Disaster Recovery?
Cloud Disaster Recovery (CDR) is a strategic approach to ensuring business data remains secure and safe during unexpected disasters. These disasters involve both natural calamities like floods or earthquakes and man-made incidents like fires, cyberattacks, or power cuts.
Businesses can indeed implement various cloud disaster recovery strategies; however, a crucial factor is to know a plan so you’re prepared to take action if and when a disaster occurs.
How to Pick a Cloud Disaster Recovery Provider?
When selecting a cloud disaster recovery provider, a company need to follow below key factors:

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Scalability
Ensure the cloud disaster recovery (DR) solution is scalable and enough capable to protect your designated data, applications, and assets. It should be able to maintain additional resources while ensuring consistent performance despite global client usage.
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Security and compliance
Understand the cloud security requirements of your disaster recovery content and verify the provider can deliver all the essential requirements such as authentications, virtual private networks (VPNs), encryption, and other necessary tools to protect your assets. Checking compliance requirements acts as a bonus where the user can verify the provider’s certifications such as PCI, DSS, ISO, 27001, and SOC 2.
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Reliability
Consider the dependability of your disaster recovery (DR) provider. Even though cloud services can sometimes experience downtime, it is crucial to avoid service interruptions during recovery to ensure business safety.
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Distance
When choosing a cloud disaster recovery (DR) provider, it is an essential factor to consider properties like physical proximity and latency. A disaster recovery site that is too close increases the risk of shared physical disasters, while one that’s too far away may cause latency and network congestion, complicating access to DR content.
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Architecture
Analyze the architecture requirements of the disaster recovery (DR) platform. DR can be managed following three modules: cold, warm, and hot. These approaches correspond to different levels of system recovery simplicity.
What are the Cloud Disaster Recovery Best Practices?
If you are one of the organizations who are considering cloud disaster recovery services for the first time and is looking for a starting point, then below are the easy-to-follow cloud disaster recovery plan to help you establish an effective recovery service:
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Understand Your Infrastructure and Outline Any Risks
Begin the process by examining your IT infrastructure, including your assets, equipment, and data. Evaluate where they are stored and their value. With this information, you can develop a customized disaster recovery plan.
Identify risks such as natural disasters, data theft, and power outages. With a clear inventory and a deep understanding of potential threats, you can create a strong disaster recovery plan resulting in minimizing or eliminating risks.
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Conduct a Business Impact Analysis
Proceed with a business impact analysis step. This step will help you identify limitations that your business may face when a disaster occurs, thus helping you to enable these considerations into your cloud disaster recovery plan.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO): In cloud disaster recovery, the recovery time objective (RTO) is much like a stopwatch for businesses during the risks. It is the maximum time your application or system can stay offline before it starts affecting your business operations.
For instance, if a company’s website crashes, how long or maximum time, it can stay offline before customers start losing their interest and opt to go somewhere else? While RTO can help provide the best solution.
Setting the right RTO is an essential factor as it balances the need for quick recovery with practical considerations like resources and technology. Opting for the correct RTO requires careful planning and preparation. RTO ensures that business runs smoothly, away from disruptions, minimizing downtime, reducing errors, and delivering maximum customer satisfaction.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The recovery point objective (RPO) acts as a guardian for your data, outlining the maximum allowable data loss in the time of disaster.
For instance, if your system crashes, how much data loss can your business handle in the process to survive before it starts impacting your business?
Setting an RPO defines a timeframe for your data recovery. Finding the right RPO means striking a balance between data protection requirements and practical considerations like storage. Effective management of RPO ensures that your data remains protected, secure, and reliable.
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Creating a Disaster Recovery Plan based on your RPO and RTO
Creating a Disaster Recovery plan based on your RPO and RTO acts as the safest and best option as it involves meticulous planning to ensure swift and effective recovery of important systems and data, for scenarios if something goes wrong.
Firstly, the RPO defines the acceptable data loss that your business can afford. For example, if your RPO is one hour, you may need to implement frequent backups in the process to save your data and minimize the risk of data loss.
Secondly, the RTO sets the maximum time required for restoring systems and operations. This determines how fast you need to protect your systems. Based on RTO, you can design and develop plans for restoring the system and recovering data.
With RPO and RTO as your guiding partner, your DR plan will include the detailed procedure, roles, communication protocols, and responsibilities. Regular testing and updates make sure everything remains smooth and secure.
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Approach the Right Cloud Partner
Once you’re completed with your disaster recovery plan, the below factors come into play for evaluating the business success:
• Reliability
• Recovery speed
• Usability
• Ease of setup and recovery
• Scalability
Major cloud service providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM, are known for their effective cloud disaster recovery solutions.
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Build Your Cloud DR Infrastructure
After consulting a cloud disaster recovery service provider, the next step is to collaborate with your provider to implement your design and establish the DR plan.
Depending on your selected disaster recovery strategies, below are a few logistics to consider:
• How will the network infrastructure support data transfer speed?
• What are the unique methods to choose for ease in the data synchronization process?
• What tools can be considered useful to monitor and manage resource utilization?
It’s important to ensure your DR plans align perfectly with your RTO and RPO to ensure smooth and seamless business operations.
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Put Your Disaster Recovery Plan on Paper
Having a standardized guideline or process flowchart with clear instructions acts as a gem for everyone involved in your IT DR plan. It is crucial for the success of an event, as it will help the complete team to be ready for an instance if a disaster occurs.
The pro tip is to note every instruction clearly on the paper with a detailed description, to guarantee the success of the cloud disaster recovery plan.
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Test Your Disaster Recovery Plan Often
Once your cloud disaster recovery plan is documented successfully, the next essential step is to perform frequent testing to identify and address any potential bugs.
Testing your DR plan is crucial, as it may look perfect on paper but its true reliability will only be verified through the finest testing.
Building something is not a one-day process, and thus, it is completely okay if you find or reveal any significant bugs. However, consider it as a learning experience that can help you enhance your disaster recovery strategy plan, and can protect your infrastructure against future threats.
The bigger your disaster recovery (DR) plan is, the more crucial it is to test. Additionally, monitoring and analyzing your backup infrastructure acts as a bonus. Remember continuous testing of your cloud disaster recovery plan ensures the safety and security of your business.
Benefits of Cloud Disaster Recovery

Cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) plans offer numerous benefits if compared to the traditional DR methods. Below are a few of them:
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Cost-efficient
Cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) plans are known to be best as it eliminates the need for costly hardware and physical infrastructures. It asks businesses to pay only for the resources used and thus helps businesses to minimize both upfront capital expenditure and maintenance costs.
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Scalability
In Cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) plans, scalability acts as the key. It enables businesses to adjust their DR resources as per the requirements, ensuring maximum protection without the utilization of excess resources.
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Quick Recovery
Cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) solutions deliver faster recovery times. Cloud services provide features like automated processes and advanced technologies to ensure quick resolution of data and systems, resulting in downtime reduction, and business continuity maintenance.
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Enhanced Security
Security is the promise in Cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) services. Multiple features become a guarantee like- data encryption, multi-factor authorization, and compliance to follow up with industry standards. These safeguards ensure the security of data during transmission and storage.
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Improved Reliability
Leading Cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) services offer maximum reliability and uptime by deploying multiple data centres. This strategy promises data availability and protection during disasters.
How AAHENT Helps in the Cloud Disaster Recovery?
Cloud disaster recovery (DR) has proved itself as the best option if compared with the traditional methods. It provides numerous benefits including cost efficiency, quick recovery, maximum security, and improved reliability. However, a few key considerations need to be considered for selecting a CDR provider, such as scalability, security, and reliability.
AAHENT has been working as a safeguard against data disasters. It provides customized strategies to ensure business can effectively navigate unforeseen disruptions. Our team of experts deliver the best solutions following the advanced technologies and by having the maximum industry expertise.
Give AAHENT a chance, because your data deserves to be protected and secured.

Hi, I am Anant, co-founder and director at AAHENT Consulting. I am a technology enthusiast and loves to discuss about software product development, latest technology trends. I am mostly focused on business analysis, project management and client management.