Disaster recovery management is a vital part of an IT manager’s job; and often the most painstaking one. The interesting fact about this particular position is that although there are training programs that allow one to prepare for the position itself, actually performing it can be challenging, what with the consistent emergence of new cloud platforms, services, features and technologies.
A great number of organizations, even in this day and age, struggle with the preparation, cost and accountability that comes with effective disaster management strategizing. On the other hand, if an organization, especially a new enterprise, wants to recover from and protect themselves from any emergencies, major or minor, they need to have an effective disaster management team, as well as strategy in place.
For enterprises who are looking to have a cloud services platform in Microsoft Azure, already have a very strong and stable infrastructure in place. However, even with a cloud service such as Azure, any number of things can go wrong when there is insufficient expertise at the foundation of the platform. When it comes to disaster management in the Azure scenario, it is a mix of both older and more traditional techniques, combined with the unique features that the platform brings with it. Let’s take a look at some of those features to get a better idea of how disaster management works in Azure.
Traditional data recovery methods involve having several data centers, so that of one gets impacted or encounters a data breach, or any unpleasant occurrence, the information, applications and any other intellectual property and assets could be moved to another data center. This is still the practice of the day, however, with the advent of the cloud, and more specifically, the multi-cloud environment, disaster recovery, as a practice, has changed in terms of the typical operandi.
Today, the disaster management strategy comprises of the following basic operations:
- Cloud service backup originating from the source of the cloud itself.
- Backing up the on-premises infrastructure and data on to the cloud, or a cloud-based data center.
- Backing up the data from one cloud to another cloud, as part of a multi-cloud environment. This element is more commonly used today, since more enterprises are moving towards the multi-cloud movements.
Now, for enterprises adopting the Microsoft Azure platform, there are a number of features, some unique to the Azure platform and some optimized to operate via Azure, that have to be contended with.
They are the following:
Geocentric Features: Datacenters in multiple locations and seamless inter-functionality
The location of a single unit of data in more than one location is not a new concept, however, with Azure, enterprises can experience seamless transfer of data from one datacenter to the other, in the event of a breach or any other cyberattack. This is necessary in terms of information security as well, since the number of locations in which the data is stored make for a framework that protects information and sensitive enterprise data.
Azure Website Recovery
The Azure site recovery feature is offered as part of the Azure platform, and it provides an easy and stress-free way to replicate the virtual machines between the regions in which they are located. The management overhead that users get with Azure website recovery is minimal, and enterprises do not require any additional secondary permissions in order to transfer the data regions.
Azure Traffic Manager
A very common occurrence in the enterprise world, when cloud computing is involved, is the failure that occurs in one region, and ends up affecting the traffic flow or assets in another region, due to the series-centric failure and the subsequent chain reaction that occurs. Deployments are hindered, and service delivery is suspended, which can be a disastrous situation for any organization.
Azure traffic manager makes sure that the failover is transferred to another region, which makes the delivery of services and deployments continuous, without having to suffer any setbacks. It is a feature unique to Azure, and it has proven to be quite advantageous, when designing an effective disaster recovery strategy.
The traffic manager feature is also quite useful when dealing with application failure, and making sure that the recovery process includes getting the application back on track, while keeping the development and quality control aspects active on another server.
Training Teams on Azure for Efficient Disaster Recovery Strategies
MS Azure training need to be on the roadmap for every organization, if operation in the cloud is a priority. To this end, training operations and development teams on the concepts of Microsoft Azure and the technologies associated with Azure will help not only streamline the disaster recovery process but will also enable the teams to become optimized with all that the Azure platform has to offer.