Author: Kushal Patel, Senior Consultant
Really? Is everyone that surprised that a cloud provider had an outage? An Amazon EC2 service disruption is never timely, but anyone with a well-planned DR strategy should not have been affected. If you want to know what happened, you can read the Amazon post mortem here.
This begs the question: “Are users of cloud service providers neglecting to consider Disaster Recovery as part of their new cloud based architecture?”
Simple answer: “If they are, they shouldn’t…”
The main message here is, read the Cloud Providers’ SLA’s, compare them to your Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives and plan accordingly. The location(s) of application, compute, network and storage resources, whether in the cloud or on-premise, does not preclude an organization from planning for DR. This includes Infrastructure, Platform, AND Software as a Service.
Consult with a DR specialist to create a design that encompasses all of your critical resources and adheres to your businesses availability needs. Like I said, “You get what you plan for…”
For those of you who were affected by the outage, I truly am sorry for your inconvenience, but I thank you for the lesson.
