AWS has a number of different cloud services available, some of which you can use for disaster recovery purposes. There is no dedicated AWS disaster recovery service, per se, but the range of options gives excellent flexibility.
Azure’s disaster recovery options can be distilled into two important services: Azure Storage and Azure Site Recovery.
Azure storage is similar to S3 in that it provides cloud-based object storage for your important data. Azure provides its storage service as a managed service so maintenance and other issues are handled for you. You access your data from anywhere online via HTTP or HTTPS.
Third-party services can also integrate with Azure to reduce Azure storage costs. The reduced costs come from implementing non-standard processes to improve storage efficiency, such as data deduplication and compression. Cloud providers usually compress stored data, but any cost savings from this are not typically passed on to end-users.
Azure Site Recovery is a dedicated disaster recovery service that promises to reduce application downtime for outages that occur and affect either on-premise apps or virtual (cloud-based) apps. You can use Site Recovery as a secondary environment for running apps.
You also have the option of reducing reliance on enterprise infrastructure altogether by running your app primarily in the Azure cloud and using Site Recovery for disaster recovery between different Azure regions.
The service promises low recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO), both of which are important targets in any disaster recovery plan. The RTO is the target time you set for recovering IT infrastructure that supports important business activities, while RPO is your company’s acceptable level of data loss expressed in time. If a given system has a 45-
minute RPO, you need to back up that system every 45 minutes.
Both AWS and Azure provide disaster recovery options with excellent durability, scalability, and pay-as-you-go pricing options.
Where they differ is that AWS doesn’t provide a dedicated disaster recovery service — you can use its services suite to address different aspects of disaster recovery, such as network, compute, or storage. The advantage of AWS in this regard is that it offers more flexibility in choices, however, Azure Site Recovery and Azure Storage arguably provide everything you need for a successful disaster recovery strategy that utilizes the cloud.
Cloud providers have changed the game when it comes to disaster recovery by providing cost-effective secondary environments for data, application workloads, and network infrastructure to combat problems associated with unexpected outages. Given the costs of just one hour of downtime, the smooth and quick recovery of mission-critical IT infrastructure after a disaster can
make a huge difference to the survivability of a business.
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