CIOs worry about two things:
- That their infrastructure doesn’t go down and is always available.
- When their infrastructure does go down (let’s be real), that they can recover quickly and without significant business interruption.
If any of these things happen, then there is a lot to worry about. It’s easy to say that every CIO should implement Disaster Recovery (DR) and High Availability (HA) to prevent single sources of failure and the ability to recover from a disaster at a moment’s notice.
There isn’t a CIO in the world who doesn’t want to implement Disaster Recovery and High Availability. But there are usually major problems when trying to obtain proper budgeting to implement these two things, especially in larger enterprises.
The problems include:
- The cost of implementing DR and HA when they are simply “insurance policies.”
- The time and resources it takes to implement and actively test that they are working properly.
However, the good news is that the cloud has enabled enterprises, big and small, to implement enterprise-grade Disaster Recovery and High Availability. All without significant costs and the added security that it will work if a disaster or point of failure happens.
The cloud has enabled infrastructures to utilize multiple available zones that are physically located around the world. So, in terms of high availability, the biggest concern is avoiding architecture with a single point of failure, and the cloud has made this possible without owning the hardware and costs of running a data center.
It has also enabled many things such as full failover, hot-standby, and cold-standby during a disaster recovery. This allows companies to failover to a fully-functional environment to support mission-critical applications.