Cloud disaster recovery is a key part of a comprehensive business continuity (BC) plan. It minimizes losses by reducing downtime and the cost of managing a secondary data center.
dinCloud offers a number of options to meet your specific DR and BC needs, including multiple global data centers. We also offer a range of functionalities that provide cost efficiency and peace of mind.
Backup and Restore
Data backups are critical to ensuring business continuity in the event of a primary data failure. This could be a hardware failure, software failure or accidental deletion of files.
Backup copies can be stored on a local server, cloud storage or even a tape device. The best approach is to have multiple copies residing in different locations and to have them regularly synchronized and maintained for the fastest possible recovery response.
A disaster could be caused by natural events (floods, earthquakes) or human-caused incidents (Ransomware, Malware and Data Breaches). Regardless of the cause, the recovery process should be fast, efficient and minimized downtime and data loss to meet your RTO and RPO objectives.
The best approach for your business depends on the types of servers you have and where they are located in your production network. You may want to consider a hybrid model using warm standby for some areas and pilot light for others or one of the full recovery models described below.
Warm Standby
The warm standby option enables you to quickly bring up and run production at a site that’s already prepared with hardware and software, but hasn’t yet been backed up and restored. This approach can be expensive, but provides fast response time and high availability.
The steps involved in performing a warm standby operation require some manual intervention from IT, but it can help to reduce overall cost and risk by reducing the number of times a backup site must be reactivated after a failure. Using warm standby can be more efficient than the cold site alternative, and it helps to achieve RTOs and RPOs that are acceptable to your business.
Virtual Server Image
The virtual server image consists of the operating system and the root file system that a VM uses to store its data. This image is in a special storage format, and it requires some software to use it.
The VM image can be stored on a physical disk in the same way as a file, but the bits are arranged differently. A consuming service needs to know what format the data is in to effectively use it.
A VM image can also be used as a template for deployment, which reduces the amount of configuration that needs to be manually performed on each new VM instance. This is important for high-availability systems.
To make a public machine image, go to the Images page in your public project for Compute Engine. Click Add to make the image public. Note that this requires the Compute Image User role (roles/compute.imageUser). Then, choose a public key to create an instance console connection.