A Quick Guide To Disaster Recovery In The Cloud From Bluelock

Create and implement the most effective DR strategy for your organization with the help of Bluelock’s action-packed guide to Disaster Recovery in the cloud. This helpful guide will help you set your DR plan in motion with a comprehensive checklist and detailed information to follow during each step.

Be prepared for anything by checking your way through each stage of the planning process, from initial inventory of applications to seasonal testing of your chosen solution.

Here’s a quick rundown of the checklist:

• List your applications
• Perform a risk assessment and business impact analysis for each application
• Determine each application’s ideal RTO and RPO
• Determine your Disaster Recovery and Backup budgets
• Determine your recovery destination

• Applications List: It’s true that you can’t protect your applications if you don’t know where each application is and what its core responsibilities are. A quick export and sort of your VM list from VMware vSphere is a simple start, but a more long-term solution should be put into place.

• Risk Assessment/Business Impact: Once your applications are inventoried, it’s helpful to perform a risk assessment and business impact analysis for each application in the company. It’s important to make sure that your Disaster Recovery plan protects what is most important to the business.
  

• Ideal RTO/RPO: It’s not just about the critical importance of an application (determined in the step before), but also the time-criticality of each application. Consider how many and how often the application processes transactions and new data, as well as how soon the application would need to be up and running after a disruption.
  

• Disaster Recovery/Backup Budgets: Each application will have minimum RTO and RPOs; however, budget constraints will most likely only allow certain applications to reach those minimums. A combination of the budget and prioritization list will help you sort which applications need to be addressed first and which can wait a little longer.
  

• Recovery Destination: The site to which you recover is dependent on the type of technology you decide to user to protect and recover your application. Cloud-based DR users can see the replication working, click and test their solution at any time and they have the backing of a service provider in case things get tricky.

For a full comprehensive checklist, download the full guide: Quick Guide to Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Planning