Disaster-Proof Your Data: How Oracle Cloud Provides Protection and Disaster Recovery
As our businesses grow, many of us become increasingly dependent on databases. We use them to make decisions, optimize marketing and operations, and keep track of customer interactions.
However, the more data we accumulate, the greater the chances of problems occurring.
What would you do if you suddenly couldn’t access your data? Unless you confidently know the answer, you might need to rethink your disaster recovery plan. In this article, we examine the option of protecting and recovering data with Oracle Cloud.
The importance of disaster recovery (DR)
Disaster recovery is about minimizing the impact of a disaster on your business operations, focusing on restoring vital technology
A DR plan should be quick to implement and work effectively. As IBM explains, “the longer the recovery time, the greater the adverse business impact. Therefore, a good disaster recovery plan should enable rapid recovery from disruptions, regardless of the source of the disruption.”
While a well-intentioned disaster recovery plan is a good start, it’s also important to make sure you have the right support in place to execute it. That way, the disaster recovery process goes just as expected to get you back up and running.
How do RTO and RPO fit into a disaster recovery plan?
Disaster recovery plans usually include two fundamental parts. The first is the recovery point objective (RPO) and the second is the recovery time objective (RTO). Using these, businesses can decide on a disaster recovery plan that suits their operations.
The RTO is the target amount of time within which business operations need to be restored. However, as Forbes points out, your RTO may or may not be your real recovery time. If something goes wrong in your plan, perhaps one of your staff is not up to speed on the right bit of software, your true recovery time changes. They refer to this as recovery time actual (RTA).
Then, there is the recovery point objective. RPO refers to how long the company can sustain data loss for. This then impacts how often you should back up data – can you afford to lose ten minutes of data? If not, continuous backups or near real time data copies may be needed.
Why Oracle Cloud?
Backing up data and creating a fool-proof disaster recovery plan is not always simple, especially when your data center is not designed for that purpose.
One option is to increase your on-premise recovery capacity, building in the costs for re-designing the system architecture, buying specially adapted storage, and upgrading to fault resilient systems. Alternatively, you could avoid these steps and instead turn to the cloud where everything is already available
How Oracle Cloud Provides Protection and Disaster Recovery
Oracle Cloud has a range of services and features to help you backup and recover data. This includes Data Guard for databases with recovery times which cannot be restored via backups, a comprehensive recovery manager system, load balancing and fast connect to help with data connectivity and redundancy, and more.
How Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) works
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is available from 30 different geographical cloud regions. You can deploy applications across different regions to reduce the risk of an outage caused by region-wide events (e.g. natural disasters).
The availability domains (data centers) in each region are isolated from each other and are unlikely to fail simultaneously. There are then three fault domains (hardware/infrastructure groupings) in each region which do not depend on the same hardware.
Oracle Cloud also offers high availability storage for every need, including object, block, and file storage.
Cost savings and lower TCO
In this cloud disaster recovery service model, businesses pay for what they use, thereby significantly reducing up-front licensing costs and bringing it within reach for many companies.
Fixed costs and complexity of owning and managing an entire DR facility are easily eliminated and a more customer-friendly OPEX model for standby systems is adopted
Implementing your disaster recovery plan
It’s important to make sure your disaster recovery plan and data backup system suit your business. Working with experts in the field can streamline the process, helping you work out and implement exactly what’s needed. At InspireIt, we can:
- Create an Oracle Cloud Strategy and Roadmap
- Determine which systems will be placed in Oracle Cloud
- Determine what types of Oracle Cloud services can be used:
- SaaS : Software as a Service
- PaaS : Platform as a Service
- IaaS : Infrastructure as a Service
To find out more, please visit our services pages or read our latest industry insights.
