With the whole world embarking on the cloud as the new & better infrastructure strategy, you might want to do the same for your enterprise. Though it seems tempting, migrating to the cloud is a big decision to take. The risks that come along might make you doubt yourself. The better way here is to do a complete cloud migration assessment & migrate your enterprise’s Disaster Recovery or DR to the cloud-first. In a way, it will be a dress rehearsal for cloud adoption. You will understand it’s working without risking your enterprise’s business continuity.
Every enterprise’s systems infrastructure is always at the risk of natural calamities like earthquakes, floods, typhoons, and more. These can destroy an enterprise’s systems/data making it almost impossible to recover. This is why most enterprises keep a disaster recovery backup in servers typically outside the city. But managing DR servers is a costly affair. That’s why many enterprises are today relying on comparatively inexpensive cloud systems for their DR data.
Why migrate your DR to the cloud?
Migrating to the cloud has several benefits including –
Maintaining an on-premise DR can cost any enterprise a lot. From buying & maintaining servers physically to building a backup infrastructure, the complete process is costly. Added to it are the costs of software licensing & the IT staff required to manage this backup data. Migrating to the cloud, most of these costs are eliminated as you no longer need servers or any hardware or software to physically store your data. Not just that, your licensing & logistics costs are saved too.
Migrating to the cloud allows for greater security of your enterprise’s data than on-premise backup. This is because cloud data is secured via high-grade encryption. Besides that, compliance with security certification & multi-faceted authentication processes adds to your data’s security.
Storage on the cloud is practically limitless. This means as your business grows, your storage can be taken care of easily, effectively & in an inexpensive manner. Since it is a pay-as-you-go system, you can keep adding cloud resources as & when needed. On the other hand, growing with on-premise backup would mean installing more servers & managing more data as you grow. Cloud adoption allows you to effortlessly increase your storage as your enterprise grows.
Data on the cloud is easily accessible at any time, from anywhere on any device. The typical on-premise backup could only be accessed from a single place, but the cloud eliminated the problem by making data more accessible. Since the cloud uses multiple servers, the servers are less likely to crash. This reduces the risk while scaling up accessibility.
Data Recovery with the cloud can happen in a jiffy. Cloud automation tools allow for recovery so fast that sometimes the complete data can be recovered in a matter of minutes. It doesn’t require application software & operating systems to patch to the previous configuration. Where the time-consuming on-site recovery needs scripting, manual administration & intervention, cloud adoption can recover your data in minutes.
How to migrate?
Once you have decided to move your DR data to the cloud you need a rather tactical approach to do so. For a typical high-level DR migration to the cloud, the following step-by-step process could be followed.
- Design & Setup all the required parameters including your network, connectivity, identity, security, RPO, RTO, and more.
- Migrate & Replicate your database, file storage, etc. to the cloud.
- Automate infrastructure as code & Deploy the application.
- Re-engineer application DevOps Pipelines for DR sync of both infrastructure & applications.
- Automate scripts for one-click cut-over.
In the case of applications that are made cloud-ready by re-engineering, the migration, replication & automation mentioned above can be considered throwaways steps. Also, the organizations have the choice of preferring a tactical approach to DR. This would mean greater ease. Consider the use of Azure Site Recovery for example, in that case, the migration, replication & automation are removed & the functioning becomes easier while giving you greater benefits like-
- You can establish foundational cloud infrastructure by designing, setting up, migrating, and replicating it to serve as a base. Your organizations can then rely on this base to develop more environments in the cloud to selectively migrate the workload to it.
- Organizations can retire from data centers, thus saving more costs.
- The execution cost of DR migration is quite low, thus giving more profit.
Migrating your DR to the cloud is a smarter move to keep all your data safe from any & all calamities that come your way. But doing it smartly isn’t such a piece of cake & you need professional help for it. Digital Alpha is here to help you every step of your way. We can help in designing & setup your foundational enterprise cloud infrastructure with the help of management groups, subscriptions, security, identity, networking, connectivity, and more. By assessing & defining the ideal migration strategy for your DR applications, we also design & implement your database. We ensure safer storage replication & implementation of application DR using cloud services tooling.
And lastly, here’s a similar story on cloud migration assessment & planning. Don’t miss to check it out!