Cloud offers high availability, but it isn’t infallible. A recent Microsoft Azure outage impacted several cloud services and the businesses that relied on them. That doesn’t mean you should take cloud out of your technology strategy, but it does mean you still need a disaster recovery plan even in the cloud.
Strategies to Reduce Cloud Outages
Here are several ways you can adapt your disaster recovery in order to minimize the impact of outages at your cloud vendor:
- Use multiple cloud regions. Chances are, an outage at your cloud vendor will be limited to a single region. You can use an alternate region to reduce the impact of an outage. When things are running fine, the region closest to your users will improve performance, but an alternate region provides a way to access services when there are problems.
- Use multiple cloud providers. If you have more than one cloud provider, you’re less likely to be impacted by an outage. One location can serve as the disaster recovery site in case of problems at the other, or you can run both locations all the time. The difficulty with using multiple clouds is that you increase your costs and the complexity of managing your environment.
- Keep an eye on the network. Unless you have a direct connection to the cloud, accessing cloud services relies on the public internet for connectivity. Make sure you know when problems are developing my keeping an eye on global internet status. You can then react to problems before they start impacting your users.
- Make sure you have solid security. While your cloud provider’s infrastructure includes cybersecurity measures, you should supplement it with your own. Use a web application firewall and other software to defend against threats that can take down your servers, such as DDoS attacks and malware.
- Use redundant name services. Relying on a single DNS service provides a single point of failure. Add a secondary DNS service to provide additional resiliency.
- Have a cloud outage strategy. No matter how many redundant systems you put in place, cloud outages will happen. Creating a plan for how you’ll respond to an outage will allow you to recover more rapidly and minimize the impact on your business.
Get help developing an effective strategy for coping with cloud outages from the team at Prescient Solutions. Our expertise in cloud and in disaster recovery allows us to customize solutions that effectively protect your critical cloud resources. Contact us to learn how our IT consulting and managed services can help your Chicago or Schaumburg business implement and appropriate disaster recovery solution for your cloud.
