When an enterprise plans a new cloud computing investment, disaster recovery is a standard part of the conversation. Just like in on-site application investments, IT knows that they must have a plan in place, but it often gets glossed over in the conversation.

These conversations are often based on three common myths about cloud computing and disaster recovery:

Myth: The Public Cloud Provider Handles Disaster Recovery

Public cloud providers do offer some disaster recovery coverage, but those features are meant to cover systemic data. Their disaster recovery plans are not created to include the specific requirements of workloads owned by their tenant.

This is a problem that often isn’t discovered until the enterprise realizes they have corrupted files or a set of files has been deleted. While the public cloud provider is prepared to handle bigger problems, such as backing up a rack of hardware or recovering from a power surge, they can’t address a lost database for the client.

Your provider will likely talk about a shared responsibility model of disaster recovery, where they provide recovery to keep systems going through a disaster or outage, but you are responsible for taking steps to back up applications and data.

Myth: You Require a Unique Disaster Recovery Plan for Each Cloud Service

While you may be able to use export and import functions for a database to back up a cloud solution, this can be a complex way to handle disaster recovery when you’re managing a variety of backup requirements. As your enterprise explores using artificial intelligence tools and implements a fleet of internet of things (IoT) devices and solutions to analyze all of the data coming from them, your disaster recovery approach will require streamlining.

Your public cloud provider may offer a backup manager built into the solution with tools that allow you to back up, but also address any governance, security, and logging needs. This allows you to manage backup and recovery across a variety of public cloud services. 

Most public cloud providers offer backup and recovery managers that are built into the public clouds. These tools allow you to select resources that you need to back up and automate the when, what, and how of that backup. They also enable you to fulfill any logging, governance, or security requirements. Leveraging these tools means you can use a single place to manage many backup and recovery tasks spanning different public cloud services. You remove the complexity by placing volatility into a configurable domain.

Myth: You Don’t Need to Worry About Compliance

Not only is this a myth; it will result in fines. Personally identifiable information or financial data is regulated, no matter where it is backed up. Your compliance processes do not extend to data that has been backed up. 

The reason this comes into a discussion about cloud computing is that when a virtual backup moves data to a secondary storage facility on a public cloud, it may apply different security policies than when it is residing in the primary storage location. For many IT teams, this problem isn’t discovered until they fail a compliance audit.As your enterprise makes new investments in cloud computing, contact us at Access Tech. We can help you design a disaster recovery plan that offers full protection for your data and systems.