Overview

• Recovery time objective (RTO) is the amount of time it takes to recover normal business operations after an outage. As you look to set your RTO, you'll need to consider how much time you're willing to lose, and the impact that time will have on your bottom line. The RTO might vary greatly from one type of business to another. For example, if a public library loses its catalog system, it can likely continue to function manually for a few days while the systems are restored.

• Recovery point objective (RPO) refers to the amount of data you can afford to lose in a disaster. You might need to copy data to a remote data center continuously so that an outage will not result in any data loss. Or you might decide that losing five minutes or one hour of data would be acceptable.

• Failover is the disaster recovery process of automatically offloading tasks to backup systems in a way that is seamless to users. You might fail over from your primary data center to a secondary site, with redundant systems that are ready to take over immediately.

• Failback is the disaster recovery process of switching back to the original systems. Once the disaster has passed and your primary data center is back up and running, you should be able to fail back seamlessly as well.

• Restore is the process of transferring backup data to your primary system or data center. The restore process is generally considered part of backup rather than disaster recovery.

• Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is a managed approach to disaster recovery. A third party hosts and manages the infrastructure used for disaster recovery. Some DRaaS offerings might provide tools to manage the disaster recovery processes or enable organizations to have those processes managed for them.

Deployment Options

Cloud

Cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solutions are becoming increasingly popular among organizations of all sizes. Many cloud solutions provide the infrastructure for storing data and, in some cases, the tools for managing backup and disaster recovery processes.

By selecting a cloud-based backup or disaster recovery offering, you can avoid the large capital investment for infrastructure as well as the costs of managing the environment. In addition, you gain rapid scalability plus the geographic distance necessary to keep data safe in the event of a regional disaster.

Cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solutions can support both on-premises and cloud-based production environments. You might decide, for example, to store only backed up or replicated data in the cloud while keeping your production environment in your own data center. With this hybrid approach, you still gain the advantages of scalability and geographic distance without having to move your production environment. In a cloud-to-cloud model, both production and disaster recovery are located in the cloud, although at different sites to ensure enough physical separation.

On-premises

In some cases, keeping certain backup or disaster recovery processes on-premises can help you retrieve data and recover IT services rapidly. Retaining some sensitive data on premises might also seem appealing if you need to comply with strict data privacy or data sovereignty regulations.

For disaster recovery, a plan that relies wholly on an on-premises environment would be challenging. If a natural disaster or power outage strikes, your entire data center, with both primary and secondary systems, would be affected. That's why most disaster recovery strategies employ a secondary site that is some distance away from the primary data center. You might locate that other site across town, across the country or across the globe depending on how you decide to balance factors such as performance, regulatory compliance and physical accessibility to the secondary site.

Technologies

• Traditional tape Despite having been around for decades, traditional magnetic tape storage can still play a role in your backup plan. With a tape solution, you can store a large amount of data reliably and cost-effectively.

  While tape can be effective for backup, it is not usually employed for disaster recovery, which requires the faster access time of disk-based storage. Also, if you need to physically retrieve a tape from an offsite vault, you could lose several hours or even days of availability.

• Snapshot-based replication

  A snapshot-based backup captures the current state of an application or disk at a moment in time. By writing only the changed data since the last snapshot, this method can help protect data while conserving storage space.

  Snapshot-based replication can be used for backup or disaster recovery. Of course, your data is only as complete as your most recent snapshot. If you take snapshots every hour, you must be willing to lose an hour's worth of data.

• Continuous replication

  Many organizations are moving toward continuous replication for disaster recovery as well as for backup. With this method, the latest copy of a disk or application is continuously replicated to another location or the cloud, minimizing downtime and providing more granular recovery points.

Management

IBM Backup as a Service (BaaS)

A range of onsite, offsite and hybrid cloud-based data protection solutions for backup, retention and retrieval.

IBM Resiliency Services

Business continuity consulting and fully managed resiliency services, including backup, disaster recovery, orchestration and cyber resiliency.

Cloud-enabled DR solutions to help ensure speed and ease of cloud recovery.

Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS)

DRaaS vendors typically provide cloud-based failover environments. This model offers significant cost savings compared with maintaining redundant dedicated hardware resources in the data center. Contracts are available in which we pay a fee for maintaining failover capabilities plus the per-use costs of the resources consumed in a disaster recovery situation. Your vendor will typically assume all responsibility for configuring and maintaining the failover environment.

Disaster recovery service offerings differ from vendor to vendor. Some vendors define their offering as a comprehensive, all-in-one solution, while others offer piecemeal services ranging from single application restoration to full data center replication in the cloud. Some offerings may include disaster recovery planning or testing services, while others will charge an additional consulting fee for these offerings.

Be sure that any enterprise software applications you rely on are supported, as are any public cloud providers that you're working with. You'll also want to ensure that application performance is satisfactory in the failover environment, and that the failover and failback procedures have been well tested.

Cloud DR

Most on-premises DR solutions will incur costs for hardware, power, labor for maintenance and administration, software, and network connectivity. In addition to the upfront capital expenditures involved in the initial setup of the DR environment, you'll need to budget for regular software upgrades. Because the DR solution must remain compatible with the primary production environment, ensure that the DR solution has the same software versions. Depending upon the specifics of the licensing agreement, this might effectively double the software costs. Not only can moving to a DRaaS subscription reduce the hardware and software expenditures, it can lower the labor costs by moving the burden of maintaining the failover site to the vendor. If you're considering third-party DRaaS solutions, you'll want to make sure that the vendor has the capacity for cross-regional multi-site backups. If a significant weather event like a hurricane impacted the primary office location, would the failover site be far enough away to remain unaffected by the storm? Also, would the vendor have adequate capacity to meet the combined needs of all its customers in the area if many were impacted at the same time? You're trusting the DRaaS vendor to meet RTOs and RPOs in times of crisis, so look for a service provider with a strong reputation for reliability.

Read Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) vs. Disaster Recovery (DR)

Disaster recovery and IBM

Disaster recovery solutions based in the IBM Cloud are resilient and reliable. We can provision a failover site in any of the more than 60 data centers located in six regions and in 18 global availability zones for low latency and in order to meet geographically-specific business requirements.

IBM disaster recovery solutions deliver enterprise-grade business continuity capabilities for on-premise, public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments. Solutions are designed to support on-premises to IBM Cloud, IBM Cloud to IBM Cloud, and third-party cloud provider to IBM Cloud disaster recovery architectures. IBM also offers business continuity consulting to help you anticipate and plan for a wide range of threats, risks, and potential business disruptions.

In addition, IBM has partnered with Zerto to introduce Zerto on IBM Cloud, a simple, scalable disaster recovery solution that installs seamlessly into the VMware vSphere environment and offers RPOs of seconds and RTOs of minutes for all virtual machines and workloads.

To learn more about IBM Cloud disaster recovery solutions and complimentary licensing for Zerto on IBM Cloud, sign up for a free IBM Cloud account today.

More info

• Design for Disaster Recovery
• IBM Cloud Disaster Recovery Solutions
• Cloud solutions for backup and disaster recovery
• Resiliency Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaas)
• IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service Migrations
• Offsite Connect in IBM Cloud withy Veeam Cloud Connect