Disaster Recovery - EUDC - Security. Performance. Support.

In the last two years, approximately 80% of companies experienced an incident that required the use of a disaster recovery plan. Organizations must protect, plan and prepare for any disruption.

EUDC DRaaS is a backup and fast recovery service for data and critical systems after a disaster. Using cloud computing resources, the EUDC Disaster Recovery service is less expensive, more flexible and more easily scalable than using IT infrastructures in a secondary location.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster Recovery (DR) encompasses the procedures, policies, or processes that prepare an organization’s vital IT infrastructure to effectively recover from natural, man-made, or cyber-attacks and to ensure business continuity. DR must cover any possible scenario that threatens the availability of the IT infrastructure. In recent years, DR has assumed an increasingly predominant role in companies’ budgets, often representing 20-25% of IT expenses.

The right plan

A DR plan outlines how an organization will respond to any disaster scenario, with the goal of supporting time-sensitive business processes and functions and maintaining full business continuity. This plan contains both responsive and preventive elements and is a key part of the company. On the receptive side, the plan delimits numerous disaster scenarios and defines the detailed responses to each, with the aim of reducing the negative impact of the respective event. Regarding prevention, the plan minimizes the negative effects of specific scenarios, defining what the organization must do to avoid them. More specifically, a plan must anticipate and delineate a plan of action in response to the loss of such critical IT components and services as:

To achieve maximum efficiency and keep costs under control, organizations should use a combination of internal resources and vendor solutions in their disaster recovery planning. The optimal internal/vendor mix depends on the organization’s specific disaster recovery objectives, which are measured by Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) ). The recovery time objective can be defined as the length of time a business can operate without system availability, while the recovery point objective expresses how old the data will be once the systems recover.

Disaster Recovery in Data Center

To meet an organization’s RTO and RPO goals, data center operators face a key challenge: data synchronization. In other words: How to make sure that the data from all alternative locations are up to date, to guarantee the coherence of the services and the continuity of the activity, even in the event of a disaster? To some extent, the answer to this question lies in the level of replication, which can be defined as the frequency with which the receiving system (backup environment) acknowledges the receipt of data from the sending system (production environment). The most common replication methods are:

Synchronous replication

The most secure but resource-intensive method of replication. In a synchronous replication scenario, the receiving system acknowledges each change received from the sending system. Adopting this method requires maintaining a "hot" backup site and is the most efficient.

Semi-synchronous replication

The receiving system sends the confirmation only after a number of changes have been received. This synchronization method is parallel to the "hot" approach and may be the right choice for services that, in the event of a disaster, may allow data loss and a period of inactivity.

Asynchronous replication

Data replication of this method is faster, but less secure, because the sending system simply continues to send data without receiving any response. This method is best suited for static resources or scenarios where data loss is acceptable.

When creating a Disaster Recovery Plan, organizations must ensure that their recovery policy is complementary to the chosen synchronization method.
For example, the “hot” synchronization / recovery policy ensures that data is always 100% synchronized and that a parallel system is always ready to take over the production system with minimal latency or downtime. However, if a data center has chosen asynchronous replication, it is possible that the expenses for maintaining a “hot” server are not justified, because it may happen that the data is not completely replicated at a certain point of failure.

EUDC offers consulting services for choosing the optimal solution.