Jeff Ton
Operating in the cloud is soon going to be a reality for many businesses whether they like it or not. Points of contention with this shift often arise from unfamiliarity and discomfort with cloud operations. However, cloud migrations don’t have to be a full lift and shift.
Instead, leaders unfamiliar with the cloud should start by moving over their disaster recovery program to the cloud, which helps to gain familiarity and understanding before a full migration of production workloads.
What is DRaaS?
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is cloud-based disaster recovery delivered as a service to organizations in a self-service, partially managed or fully managed service model. The agility of DR in the cloud affords businesses a geographically diverse location to failover operations and run as close to normal as possible following a disruptive event. DRaaS emphasizes speed of recovery so that this failover is as seamless as possible. Plus, technology teams can offload some of the more burdensome aspects of maintaining and testing their disaster recovery.
DRaaS is a perfect candidate for a first step into the cloud for five main reasons:
- Using DRaaS helps leaders get accustomed to the ins and outs of cloud before conducting a full production shift.
- Testing cycles of the DRaaS solution allows IT teams to see firsthand how their applications will operate in a cloud environment, enabling them to identify the applications that will need a full or partial refactor before migrating to the cloud.
- With DRaaS, technology leaders can demonstrate an early win in the cloud without risking full production.
- DRaaS success helps gain full buy-in from stakeholders, board members and executives.
- The replication tools that DRaaS uses are sometimes the same tools used to migrate workloads for production environments — this helps the technology team practice their cloud migration strategy.
Steps to start your DRaaS journey to the cloud
Define your strategy
Do your research to determine if DRaaS is right for you given your long-term organizational goals. You don’t want to start down a path to one cloud environment if that cloud isn’t aligned with your company’s objectives, both for the short and long term. Having cross-functional conversations among business units and with company executives will assist in defining and iterating your strategy.
Compare DRaaS providers
Speak with DRaaS providers and select the right partner. Consider what SLAs they offer for their services, and if they’ll put those promises in writing. What sort of solutions do they have for tiering your applications? If everything is tossed into a single bucket and given on SLA, you’re either paying too much or you’re left underprotected from an event. An RFP is recommended when coming down to the purchasing stage to delve into these questions in detail.
Implement and test
Once you have selected the right DRaaS provider, implement, test and build your disaster recovery runbook. Depending on the managed service model, the DRaaS provider should help you do these things or even do them entirely on your behalf. If you are expecting your team to learn from going to the cloud for DRaaS to gain new skills for a production migration, it’s best to keep them involved at every stage of the DRaaS onboarding, even if they are a fly on the wall.
Let your experts learn
When it comes to disaster recovery testing, allow for extra time to let your IT staff learn the ins and outs of the cloud environment. Take time for full failover operations, regression testing, application testing, etc. — everything that you foresee them needing to learn during the production migration to the cloud. You are giving them a sandbox to play in.
Taking this approach will not only decrease the IT team’s anxiety when going to the cloud, it will also afford them the ability to gain new cloud skills that puts their fears to rest that with cloud, their roles will be at risk. Taking this approach works to counteract this anxiety, thereby reducing the number of cloud skeptics on your team.
Share your success
Share your success with business leadership for greater buy-in for a full cloud migration. This success sharing will, in part, help to guard against cloud skeptics trying to take down the project as you begin planning for a full transition into cloud.
Strategize your production workloads migration pathway
Start researching the best migration pathway for your production by speaking with peers and experts and building a roadmap. Sometimes this pathway to the cloud for production workloads can include a full failover to your disaster recovery environment followed by transitioning the operations into a newly prepared production environment in the cloud.
It can include using the same DRaaS replication tools just pointed at another target location to transfer operations from on-premise workloads to the new cloud environment, or you may need to use a different pathway altogether. In the end, you must do what’s best for each workload’s unique needs.
When executing your full cloud migration plan, be sure to have your DRaaS provider on standby in case anything goes awry.
The future of business
With so many organizations moving to the cloud, this new stance for operations will have rippling impacts on the wider business landscape. As technology teams reap the benefits of increased agility, innovation will accelerate, which means those not in the cloud will soon struggle to keep up with competition.
For businesses that are not yet fully ready for a large-scale migration of their production workloads, DRaaS makes a good stepping stone into the cloud. Think of how Blockbuster realized Netflix was a major competitor too late, or the taxi industry was upended by Uber. The same could be true for cloud once most organizations achieve their cloud journey objectives. Best not to wait.
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