When thinking about data recovery, many people now think of cloud-based recovery. This automation makes it easy to recover lost data from your database rather than having to recover it all manually, or lose it forever. As with all decisions, this is not one to take lightly. There are many moving pieces that must be considered, not the least of which is what your goals are.
When you own a business, the last thing you want is the information from your sales database to be lost, or information from any database for that matter. That’s why the automation of cloud-based disaster recovery is so appealing. With this system in place, you don’t have to worry about lost or missing information.
Naturally, everyone wants a low recovery point objective (RPO) and a low recovery time objective (RTO). When speaking of data, RPO deals with the amount of data you can lose and RTO deals with the time it takes for that data to be recovered.
Cloud technology allows for this recovery process to be done through automation, meaning that once you send your data to the cloud it can be recovered in a matter of seconds if your system fails and data is lost. Sometimes, an administrator doesn’t even know the data has been lost before disaster recovery fixes the database issue. That is a very attractive selling point of cloud-based disaster recovery.
The type of backup will ultimately factor into your decision. Crash-consistent backups are essentially backups based on snapshots. That means a copy of the backup is taken to storage and saved for cloud-based recovery. This also means that backups of your database need to be taken regularly to be effective.
There are also application-consistent backups, which use the operating system environment (OSE) to flush the write caches and send storage to the cloud. This type of automation can be considered as the minimum a database workload should use.
An automated disaster cloud-based recovery system is a good thing to have. Your database is protected and stored for quick and easy recovery in the event that information is lost.
Some companies opt to have a second database where every change made in the database is sent for secure backup. This is referred to as continuous data protection (CDP) and is really the only truly effective method for ensuring that every single change is recorded and saved. With that said, this is a costly venture and not every company can afford it. However, that doesn’t mean automation of your disaster recovery is impossible.
When considering cloud-based disaster recovery options, you need to determine what your main goals are for saving and securing your data. If you’re looking for a low recovery time and low recovery point then a system using automation would suit your needs. It is, by far, the less expensive option since you don’t need to maintain a second system. However, you need to decide what your business needs and can afford, and then work backward to find the perfect disaster recovery solution for you.
