The cloud revolution has improved computing agility and efficiency, but digital assets aren’t immune to natural or man-made disasters. As a result, businesses must have a business continuity/disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy and playbook in place to deal with data loss or disruptions. Cloud disaster recovery is one such solution that’s been gaining popularity for its cost benefits, scalability and flexibility.

However, some enterprises may be hesitant to use this technology. They could have privacy concerns, which stem from the fact that they’re trusting third parties with their data to store and access it. Additionally, they might be concerned about how a disaster might disrupt their business, or how long it might take them to recover from a failure. It’s important to understand the pros and cons of a cloud disaster recovery solution before making any decisions.

Cost benefits

The primary benefit of a cloud disaster recovery solution is that it eliminates the need for organizations to invest in secondary site data centers or hardware. Businesses pay for the compute resources used in a failover to the cloud on a per-use basis, which means they don’t incur capital expenses until they need to utilize their DR system during a disaster. This helps reduce a company’s overall IT infrastructure costs and improves its bottom line.

Scalability

Another big advantage of a cloud-based DR solution is that it can grow with the organization as their data and systems evolve and change. Most DRaaS solutions offer a pay-as-you-go model, which makes it easy for companies to increase or decrease their DR capacity as needed without incurring significant upfront costs. This is an appealing feature to small and mid-sized organizations that might struggle to justify the costs of investing in their own DR infrastructure.

Flexibility

Using a cloud-based DR solution can help businesses maintain agility and flexibility in the face of unexpected data loss or disruptions. The ability to spin up a virtual server image and test recovery capabilities on a day-to-day basis enables organizations to quickly respond to outages and ensure that their critical data is protected from disruptions.

A cloud disaster recovery solution can also mitigate regional events such as natural disasters by replicating and storing data in geographically distinct locations. This is known as the warm standby approach and provides a functional, but scaled-down version of your fully functional environment to help minimize outages and disruptions in the event of a catastrophe. However, this approach requires a lot of maintenance and can become expensive. It’s important to define your RTO and RPO and align them with the capabilities of your DRaaS provider before choosing a specific strategy. Then, you can be sure your organization will have the right backup and recovery options for its unique needs.