As we discussed in the article Disaster Recovery using the Cloud, it is possible to use public cloud services to strengthen the disaster recovery strategy of a company’s mission-critical services.
One of the elements to consider in a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is to prepare one or more datacenters to launch critical services in the event of the primary datacenter’s total unavailability, especially when recovery is not possible for a certain period of time, in order to avoid disturbing daily operations.
A well-designed Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy must allow the company to operate will few or no drawbacks in a disaster scenario. One of the latest trends when defining DR solutions is the incorporation of public cloud services to host the contingency datacenter(s).
Microsoft Azure is currently among the leaders in DR as a Service solutions in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, which measures completeness of vision and the ability to execute it.
Azure Recovery Services may contribute to your business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy with two complementary services:
- Backup service: Azure’s backup service provides an integrated backup copy of your data in a simple, secure, and cost-effective way. It allows to back up a datacenter’s servers, featuring the following alternatives:
o Azure-Azure Replication: when the primary datacenter is already deployed on Azure.
o On-premises-Azure Replication: when the primary datacenter is on-premise. This backup method is compatible with VMware, Hyper-V servers and physical devices (using an additional agent, only Windows and Linux).
Azure backup also provides for native and integrated replication and backup of MS SQL Server databases. For other DB engines, these must be replicated by using the engine’s tools directly.
- Site Recovery service: this service automates and orchestrates the recovery of existing backups, ensuring business continuity by keeping business apps and workloads running during outages.
Site Recovery replicates workloads running on physical and virtual machines (VM) from a primary site to a secondary location in the cloud. When an outage occurs at your primary site, you fail over to a secondary location in the cloud, and access apps from there. Once the primary location is operational again, you can fail back to it.
Keep in mind that it is always possible to have a cloud Disaster Recovery datacenter smaller than the one in production and only in case of contingency increase the DR server’s size to that of the production infrastructure. Recovery times are slightly higher but in return there are considerable savings in fixed costs required to maintain the DR infrastructure available, increasing only in case of a disaster.
At Novis we have enough experience to guide your company when making this decision, especially for SAP® solutions, based on the analysis of your business processes and current infrastructure.
Contact us, we can help you with your projects.
Article by Gilda Valderrama, Novis Bulletin editor. Interview with Eduardo Morales, SAP Cloud Solutions Architect.
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