The implementation of disaster recovery has significantly evolved in recent times, from tape-based solutions to collocation and hosted services, to cloud computing and managed service offerings. However, unlike previous DR manifestations, cloud computing takes a fully-virtualized approach to disaster recovery by encapsulating all server resources (operating system, patches, applications, data, and so on) into a virtual bundle, which can then be copied or transferred across environments in minutes. This significantly reduces recovery times when compared to conventional DR approaches, where servers needed to be preloaded with the entire stack, including the operating system, prior to initiating data restoration.
The cloud also makes DR cold sites obsolete, as warm or hot sites become a very cost-effective option that can be easily and permanently architected as part of the application architecture, or spun up on-demand. This implementation is a departure from traditional...