What is Cloud Provider Resiliency (CPR):
Cloud Provider Resiliency or CPR is the methodology of ensuring that, should your data and servers hosted in a Cloud, whether private or public is recoverable to another public or private cloud provider. As we have seen over the years large outages or targeted cyber attacks can and have rendered certain cloud providers and their services inoperable for periods of time. Most organizations can not afford such outages and if you are bound to only one cloud provider you may be left vulnerable.
About 67% of companies currently operate in a public cloud, while 45% use a private cloud. As businesses increasingly rely on cloud computing and digital infrastructure to operate and compete, it’s crucial to understand the significance of cloud provider resilience (CPR) and its advantages to your business. Let’s examine why companies should consider CPR, how to improve CPR and explore its advantages.
Understanding Cloud Provider Resiliency
CPR refers to the ability of a cloud service to survive and recover, with little to no service disruption, from events such as hardware failures, power outages, unexpected spikes in demand, software failures and even cyber-attacks.
True CPR is built on redundancy. As the term suggests, redundancy means your data stored in the cloud is duplicated, replicated or backed up, enabling you to immediately retrieve or access that information should your cloud service be compromised or experience an outage. Ideally, you want to spread your risk across more than one cloud provider to reduce the chances of downtime.
Some advantages of CPR:
- Failover and business continuity to another CSP: As mentioned, when your primary cloud becomes unavailable you won’t be able to restore your data and systems to the same cloud provider. True CPR allows you to failover to a secondary cloud where your data and systems are immediately available and functional. The result: operations will continue as usual.
- Enhanced data security: Resilience and security go hand in hand. An important aspect of CPR is its ability to provide robust data security and regulatory compliance measures. Reputable cloud providers invest heavily in security technologies and implement strict protocols to protect sensitive customer information and protect businesses from cyberattacks and data breaches. Most mainstream Public cloud providers however do not leverage competitors clouds for such resiliency which it is important to consider separating your cloud provider and DRaaS provider should your provider not offer multi cloud offerings.
- Compliance: Cloud services continually update their systems and processes to comply with the latest industry regulations and standards. By choosing CPR, businesses can ensure their data remains secure and minimize the risk of data breaches or loss while also staying compliant with relevant regulations.
- Reduced downtime: A robust cloud system incorporating CPR can minimize downtime by promptly recovering from faults. It is important to align with a CPR provider that offers a solution based approach offering multiple options for backup, DRaaS and replication and not a provider that will try to align your needs with a single vendor’s solution.
Final thoughts
The core principles of DR planning should not change when your business is hosted in the cloud, as such it is important that you are able to recover from one cloud to another as you would have from your main office datacenter to a DRaaS environment. Not all servers are equally important and as such, choose a provider that allows for various RTO and RPO options depending on the criticality of a system within your business. Geo-redundancy is not a disaster recovery grade, scalable RTO and RPO solution. These strategies will alleviate the traditional failures in current Hyperscaler deployments and avoid the risk of having “all your eggs in one Cloud basket”.
