Protecting Your Virtual Infrastructure With Disaster Recovery

When your business makes use of hybrid cloud technology, you will need to take as much care of your virtual infrastructure as you do your physical framework.

An important part of this is making arrangements for the backup of data and making a disaster recovery plan should it be needed. When looking for a public cloud supplier, you should make finding out what options they offer for disaster recovery one of your priorities.

There are a number of features that you will want disaster recovery services to be able to offer. Your public cloud supplier should be able to manage as much of the disaster recovery policies as possible for the data that is in the cloud, as this takes a lot of pressure off you and your employees. Their service should include monitoring all your backups and implementing the replication of your data. Alongside which, they should also make support available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week so an immediate solution can be found if something does go wrong.

The backup policy that is created by your business and the public cloud supplier should be fully documented. This document should then be made available in the cloud so that, if it is ever needed, it can be accessed quickly by both parties. You should look to use a company that would provide backups at file level. This helps to ensure that the protection of your virtual infrastructure from the public cloud supplier is a fully managed service.

It is also important to make the right arrangements for the software that will be used to manage your replicated data. If you already have your own software in place for your onsite backups then all that may be required is for you to find an offsite location for this data, which your public cloud supplier should be able to provide for you.

A good supplier should have a dedicated storage area that is capable of accepting data from multiple protocols which will ensure that all of your data can be stored securely. You will not want to pay for this storage if you are not using it, so choose a supplier that provides access to this storage on a pay as you go basis. A good practice is to store two separate backups of all data?—?this is another feature that you will want to look for.

You are likely to already have your own disaster recovery policies in place for the data that will remain within your organisation, so the policies that your public cloud supplier will use should be an extension of these. Ensuring that this is the case will make certain that the entire infrastructure of your hybrid cloud has the protection that it needs.