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In today’s market, all companies are technology companies. Yet, Invenio IT reports that every 1 in 5 organizations does not have a disaster recovery plan. A company without a disaster recovery is prone to the type of IT disaster (from server corruptions, data center failures and cyberattacks) that can disrupt the entire functioning of day-to-day operations. Most organizations backup their data on tapes, which are pretty expensive and difficult to maintain. The restoration process is also time-consuming, and such solutions are often not viable for backups.
AWS offers extremely reliable backup and disaster recovery solutions that are not just secure, but it’s highly scalable. It is also extremely effective for better RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) in disastrous situations. The percentage of businesses that recover fast due to RPO and RTO is below 2%.
This article is focused on some of the most effective practices for backup and disaster recovery, along with insights regarding AWS backup and disaster recovery plans.
The following practices can help you minimize the costs associated with these issues as well as to help improve your overall backup and disaster recovery strategies and plans:
1. Single Backup & DR Solution
Buying separate solutions for backups and Low RPO & RTO Disaster Recovery can significantly increase your cloud infrastructure costs. Therefore, always look for a reliable one-stop solution provider such as AWS that provides backups, low RPO and RTO Disaster Recovery and fast retention in your cloud in one platform.
2. Multi-Cloud & Hybrid Cloud
An ideal cloud backup solution must be flexible to protect multiple on-premise workloads along with hybrid AWS, Azure and GCP workloads as necessary. AWS’ backup and disaster recovery solution allows you to manage on-premise and cloud workloads from a single dashboard, rather than multiple scattered tools that become difficult to manage.
3. Multiple Database Support
If you’re working with various database systems such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL for mission-critical applications, it is necessary to use a solution that protects all databases on cloud systems as well as any on-premise databases.
4. Low RPO for Critical Databases
Native cloud snapshots are not application-consistent for databases. Therefore, Database Administrators often avoid cloud snapshots for databases active and running in cloud VMs.
Many database administrators may consider using a legacy approach for the databases to disk in the cloud. However, it can significantly increase storage costs and may result in high RPO. AWS offers application-consistent, incremental forever backups.
5. Direct Recovery from Cloud Object Storage
Cloud object storage, such as AWS S3, is the most viable solution to store backups for minimizing the cloud infrastructure costs. S3 is also capable of mounting backups from cloud object storage, VMs and recovery databases easily.
6. On-premise Backup Storage
On-premise backup storage can pose additional costs for your organization. Therefore, it is a wise option to eliminate it and look for a solution for direct backups from on-premise to public cloud. It will potentially cut off any unnecessary costs while handling most of the workload.
7. Utilize Backups for Analytics & Testing
Organizations often leave backups unattended because it simply serves no immediate purpose for them. However, such data can be easily mounted and used for analytics if you are using the correct solution. This data can potentially be used as source data for warehouse or simply for offline testing.
8. On-premise Disaster Recovery Infrastructure
Legacy DR can be a liability for organizations. It needs a hundred percent storage allocation at a separate location. Moreover, it is rarely utilized, and it only increases the liabilities of an organization while elevating the costs.
A more viable option is to always look for solutions that offer a single-click DR orchestration in public clouds such as AWS. This approach can significantly eliminate unnecessary, expensive costs for on-premise storage.
AWS offers reliable and scalable backup services that are not only cost-effective, but also adhere to all regulatory compliance of your business. AWS backups allow you to centrally manage it with Console, CLI or APIs.
Through the AWS Management Console you can easily assign any AWS resources such as Amazon Aurora, Amazon EFS and Amazon RDS, etc. Depending on your backup plans, all your workload is backed up automatically. AWS also offers a range of monitoring tools for your backups, along with easy modifications and fast restorations. Overall, it is a premium option for both cloud-native and hybrid backups.
AWS provides a free tier setup without any hidden charges. Also, the platform charges based on used backup storage and amount of restored backup data. Customers are charged on a monthly basis without any restrictions on minimum charges.
Backup storage pricing also varies in each resource type but for most resources, it falls somewhere around $0.05 per GB-Month for warm storage while cold storage is free for most resource types with costs only being incurred on retrieval. There are restoration prices for Amazon EFS and DynamoDB, however other resource types can enjoy completely free restorations without any additional costs. Explore AWS Backup Pricing on their official webpage.
In addition, AWS offers CloudEndure Disaster Recovery Solution for instant recovery of physical, virtual, and cloud-based servers with little to no downtime. The solution also works well with popular databases including Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server.
Snapshot-based solutions often lack in asynchronous and continuous replication, while CloudEndure always minimizes the Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) & Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), even for the heaviest workloads. It is a one-stop solution for all critical databases, and organizations no longer need to purchase separate DR tools for multiple purposes.
There are no defined contracts for Disaster Recovery in AWS. The CloudEndure Disaster Recovery charges you on an hourly basis. Therefore, you are free from any type of long-term contracts that put certain limitations above you.
The current hourly rate per source server for CloudEndure is $0.028, which is justifiable based on all of the features. An additional cost with CloudEndure subscription includes charges for low-cost staging resources created during the process of continuous replication.
You can use AWS Calculator to get a completely free estimation of your costs, or learn more at their official CloudEndure Disaster Recovery pricing page.
Data is the most valuable asset for all organizations in the global market today. However, it's important to use the best market solutions to take backups and implement the most effective disaster recovery plans.
There are many tools and services that might be secure and cost-effective, but AWS is a one-stop platform for all your backup and disaster recovery needs. Such solutions from one centralized location provide you with all necessary tools so that you do not have to integrate various solutions from different providers that are often ineffective and costly. AWS mitigates your risk while supporting your organization to be cost-effective and sustainable long term to protect your business.
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Agustin Romano
