Downtime hurts business. Implementing a comprehensive disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) strategy can help you recover quickly from unplanned disruptions so that your business can be back in action quickly. Where’s the best place to start when implementing a complete and effective disaster recovery solution?
Start by creating a disaster recovery (DR) strategy. Identify your business goals. Determine your recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). Identify any time, cost, storage and application constraints. Define a high-level DR plan with specific execution tasks that identifies who will do what and when.
Discover and analyze the environments to be protected. Gather information on virtual workloads, applications and virtual infrastructure. Evaluate the packet flows between workloads in the current environment, and map the dependencies within each application and between applications. Define protection groups that will fail over together following your restart priorities. Configure the replication timing and snapshot frequency to match your identified RPO and RTO requirements.
Create a detailed disaster recovery plan with a specific sequence of recovery steps. Design the target DR site to match compute, networking, storage and memory requirements. Configure the target DR site and map the source site resources to it. Define any custom scripts that are needed, for example a script to notify the operations team that a recovery is in process. Integrate your DR plan into your organization’s broader DR plan.
Execute the DR plans to validate failover. Your production replication will continue during the testing without interruption. If any changes are needed update the DR plans accordingly. Continue to test and update until the DR plans are reliable and consistent.
Finally, get started operating your DRaaS solution. Continuously discover and analyze configuration changes, and update and test your DR plans to maintain ongoing parity between your current environment and your DR plans.
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