Maybe it is now obvious: “Just because you’ve moved your applications to the cloud doesn’t mean they’re automatically protected by the cloud providers against disasters”.
Business critical applications’ survival depends on DR. Organization compliance departments demand DR. SOC II, ISO 27000, and a bunch of other compliance certifications requires DR. Public company CEOs and CFOs sign dotted lines for SOX compliance that need DR. Ransomware recovery depends on DR. But the rest of the time DR infrastructure is idle. And DR is utterly complex and takes a lot of time, cloud dollars, and resources to keep up to the production changes. Who has time to keep up with DR when production environments demand 200% of the team’s time and resources? So, why waste precious cloud dollars on in-cloud DR applications? Let’s explore how we can eliminate most of the cloud costs and maintenance nightmare associated with idle DR environments for in-cloud applications.
What are in-cloud applications?
Any application that runs on the hyperscale public cloud infrastructures is an in-cloud application. We are not talking about applications running on cloud-washed on-prem environments. In-cloud applications do not rely on infrastructure from the on-prem data center or other cloud provider infrastructures but may be relying on some external services in order to deliver business value.
In-cloud applications waste cloud dollars with DR
Organizations waste serious cloud dollars on disaster recovery (DR). In order to create a meaningful disaster recovery environment, enterprises need to spend close to 1.5x* that of the production environment. This spend includes a DR setup equivalent to the production environment; data and application replication software costs; data storage costs; software maintenance costs, and DR testing costs, including the cost of personnel allocated from the platform, application, database, servers, storage, and network teams.
Risk and complexity cost of DR
Custom applications and associated infrastructure add to tremendous complexity and that complexity directly leads to higher costs. This is true for most of the applications lifted and shifted over to the cloud. The fact that we need 100s and sometimes 1000s of steps in a runbook along with doubling of the infrastructure and application complexity, tells us to postpone any DR preparedness to the end of the year project cycle. Ever changing dynamic applications’ cloud infrastructure, continuous updates to the application features enabled by fast moving cloud infrastructure configurations, DR preparedness has only complicated and increased the risks for organizations and hence the increase in overall DR cost.
Myth of In-cloud application protection by cloud providers
Organizations that have moved to the hyperscale clouds now realize that cloud services are not protected by default for disaster recovery. I recall H. L. Mencken’s observation: “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
The right way to protect your business is to properly protect your applications using all the dynamic cloud services; replicate the data, metadata, configuration and application state so you can recover them fast in the event of a downtime.
Can you eliminate in-cloud DR waste and yet recover your applications hyperfast?
YES.
Appranix delivers cloud application resilience with protection and rapid recovery of distributed cloud application environments. With our application-centric, cloud-native entire environment resources backup, recovery, and failover capabilities, Appranix SaaS eliminates eight to ten layers of environment complexity for organizations to recover quickly from ransomware attacks, cloud misconfigurations, human errors, and cloud zone or region failures.
