8CIOReview | | DECEMBER 2021IN MY OPINIONTHE NEW FACE OF DISASTER RECOVERY IN A CLOUD-ENABLED ENVIRONMENTBy Felipe Medina, VP of Information Security Engineering, BankUnitedThe advancement of Cloud technologies and cloud-native design patterns has significantly altered the Information Technology (IT) landscape, however one would argue that no area of IT has been more influenced by Cloud than Disaster Recovery (DR) and the emergence of DRaaS (disaster recovery as a service).Traditionally speaking, legacy DR has entailed significant capital investment in often-times underutilized technology assets and facilities. This activity typically involving technology engineers planning and building production equivalent (or resembling) environments in a geographically diverse location with various forms of data synchronization and circuitry linking the two (or in some instances multiple sites beyond two (2)).So, in what ways has Cloud influenced DR? Provided below we will dive into this in more detail by reviewing it through the prism of the three (3) primary public cloud providers, those being Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).Public CloudFor those companies willing to make the plunge into public cloud adoption (specifically AWS, Azure, and/or GCP (Google Cloud)) there are a number of CSP (cloud service provider) specific services available to help improve an organization's recovery posture while doing so in a more cost-effectivemanner.· AWS ­Back in January of 2019 AWS announced the acquisition of the Israeli start-up CloudEndure. Prior to its acquisition, CloudEndure was an AWS Advanced Technology Partnerwith both disaster recovery and backup-as-a-service capabilities for AWS, Azure and GCP clouds alike. AWS has since integrated CloudEndure as part of its core platform services thereby enabling customers who are either migrating to AWS, leveraging AWS in a hybrid cloud model, and/or supporting a multi-region cloud estate to have access to a managed service for backup and recoveryneeds. CloudEndure enables this using secureprotocols for data transport and ongoing synchronization. The CloudEndure service also offers means by which to keep traditional cold site (or in this case region) costs down by not requiring parity between the two from a compute perspective. In essence you pay for the data storage in your secondary site and should the time come to leverage the site/region, automated runbooks created within the CloudEndure platform can be used to spin-up the required EC2 compute to support the fail-over effort(s).· Azure ­Microsoft customers interested in and/or currently leveraging Azure have use of the ASR (Azure Site Recovery) managed service which was created in-house at Microsoft but really began to take form after the June 2014 acquisition and later integration of InMage. InMage was a US/India based company specializing in the continuous data protection space through their Scout service. Similar to CloudEndure, ASR checks all the requisite The CloudEndure service also offers means by which to keep traditional cold site (or in this case region) costs down by not requiring parity between the two from a compute perspective
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