There is an immense number of ways to build a solid disaster recovery strategy, and the most notable cloud providers are:
- Amazon Web Services
- Google Cloud Platform
- Microsoft Azure (with the Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery services)
- OpenStack disaster recovery
Choosing any of these providers totally makes sense, as they are large, trustworthy and give full direct control over their services. On the other hand, there are certain drawbacks to using this approach.
For instance, AWS assumes that you put together your own disaster recovery solution from scratch, based on its own basic cloud services. This leads to the conclusion that AWS is viable for those who are already familiar with the provider and have enough knowledge and skills to set up disaster recovery manually or semi-manually. Also AWS offers customers to use their third partly Disaster Recovery service (CloudEndure).
Google Cloud Platform doesn’t provide any out-of-the-box DR service at all, let alone an all-round Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service solution. So, users are expected to create their own disaster recovery solution using standard Google Cloud services, which also have much less customization and optimization flexibility than Amazon. Just like Amazon, a challenging task to recreate an on-premises environment in the cloud persists.
OpenStack is another cloud service that just provides the capabilities for disaster recovery. As their manual says, “Determining and selecting what application and services to protect is the responsibility of the user, while handling the logistics of protecting is up to the cloud (and its operator).”
As for Azure, Microsoft actually does offer a sound disaster recovery solution, Azure Site Recovery (ASR), which we already covered in our article devoted to Microsoft’s DR service. Azure Site Recovery is a good choice for organizations that have mission-critical workloads running primarily on VMware or Hyper-V. Microsoft’s DRaaS is closely integrated with Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager, a software product developed for managing large arrays of computers running Windows NT, Windows Embedded, macOS, Linux or UNIX, as well as various mobile operating systems, which makes ASR convenient for organizations that stick to the Microsoft stack.
However, when it comes to advanced disaster recovery scenarios, ASR still requires a high level of expertise on the part of an IT department. It also lacks automation and requires additional software to be fully operational and feature-packed. There are also several requirements, such as a limit of 1TB for local disks, that should be met in order to be able to use ASR.
