Use of cloud for DR solutions is becoming more common, even the organizations
which are not using cloud for mission critical production applications are
moving towards using cloud for application DR.
Business Case for Using Cloud for the DR
Faster Recovery Time Objective (RTO): Typically DR requires lengthy manual
processes to fully restore the business applications at the DR site. Having
backup data and servers at the DR site is easy, however, restoring the entire
application or service takes time. E.g. full application restoration
requires starting services in specified order, performing dns and other
configuration updates etc. In Cloud, the IaaS APIs provide ability to use
automation solutions like Kaavo IMOD to fully restore the business
applications automatically without manual intervention. As a result
organizations get predictable recovery and reduced RTO... (more)
One of our customers wanted to establish a site to site connectivity between
their datacenter and public cloud (Amazon EC2) and then have a private
network within Amazon EC2 with their own custom IP addresses for their
servers in the cloud.
Basically the idea here is to augment the internal datacenter resources with
the resources in the public cloud securely so that the servers in the cloud
appear as if they are part of their own private corporate network. The idea
here is to isolate the servers used by the customer in the cloud from the
rest of the servers in the cloud using ... (more)
University of Berkley has published an excellent paper on cloud computing,
the argument regarding data security in the cloud is that encrypted data in
the cloud can be more secure than unencrypted data in the internal
datacenter. Almost nobody uses encryption in internal datacenters as they are
percieved as secure. Here is an excerpt from the study:
“We believe that there are no fundamental obstacles to making a
cloud-computing environment as secure as the vast majority of in-house IT
environments, and that many of the obstacles can be overcome immediately with
well understood ... (more)
To optimally use the cloud and to effectively manage the service levels of
applications we need two things:
1) On-demand configuration: Without cloud it used to take us several days to
procure infrastructure resources so it was acceptable to spend couple of days
configuring servers and installing software to get the applications to
work. However, with the cloud we can get the infrastructure resources on
demand within minutes, so it is no longer acceptable to spend few days
configuring the infrastructure to run applications or workloads in the
cloud. Users are looking for on-de... (more)
Several popular websites and companies were impacted by the recent Amazon
cloud outage. It was quite surprising to see that so many of the companies
had no backup plans to restore their applications at an alternate location.
Just because we are using cloud doesn’t mean that we should forget all
the lessons we have learned over the years in managing IT risks. There are
several ways companies can mitigate their risk exposure due to these types of
outages. For example one of Kaavo’s customers runs their application
across Amazon and Rackspace cloud using Kaavo IMOD; ... (more)
Jamal Mazhar is Founder & CEO of 
Derek Granath
Tom Flynn
Patrick Pushor
Bob Evans
