Last Update: Sep 04, 2024 | Published: Mar 08, 2017
The cloud has become an important asset for businesses of all sizes, and most organizations have implemented some type of hybrid cloud environment in which the cloud is used for several different IT functions, including development, testing, backup, and business continuity. For many companies, these cloud resources have become an integral part of their infrastructure and they have leveraged the hybrid cloud for the high availability and disaster recovery (HADR) of their on-premises virtualization infrastructure. There are several important advantages to implementing HADR in the cloud. The cloud is an architecture that provides extremely high uptime and its ubiquitous connectivity enables cloud provider resources to be accessed globally. Perhaps more importantly, the cloud also offers a pay-as-you-go model in which you pay only for the cloud resources that you use. This can make the cloud a much lower cost option than a separate physical HADR site.
Ensuring the availability of hybrid cloud resources has different challenges than implementing on-premises HADR implementations. A common mistake that businesses make when they modernize their heterogeneous IT environments to incorporate the cloud is that they often fail to make corresponding enhancements to the protection environment as well. When the corresponding protection modernization efforts are not implemented, virtual machine (VM) availability can be limited and recovery failures can result.
Some of the important factors that you should consider when you are modernizing your hybrid cloud availability environment include:
The cloud can be an effective HADR asset to your company, but to take full advantage of it, you need to make sure the availability technologies you implement keep pace with your hybrid cloud infrastructure.