Disaster Recovery on Cloud - Security Compliance Challenges and Best Practices

Business continuity and Disaster recovery (DR) are crucial aspects for any enterprise. With IT Infrastructure landscape becoming more and more complex and the ever increasing dependence of Business Processes on IT systems, ensuring high availability becomes more challenging. But traditional methods of DR by Hardware duplication and DATA-only back up fail to strike a balance between "Invest Less = Gain more " objective of Corporations. The methods are extremely capital, labor intensive. Whereas a perfect alternative for this traditional approach of DR is Cloud based Disaster recovery, which will reduce TCO by more than 40 percent. Also with reduction in carbon foot print it provides way for Green IT, at the same time not compromising on RTO and RPO requirements. Also they come with the ease on DR testing which seem to be a much neglected across Enterprises. A major concern that CIO have is the security compliance and the regulatory constraints that they face. Even though cloud computing has evolved over a years, the security aspects are still in nascent stage. An investment on DR on cloud will turn to be more attractive once these security compliance concerns are addressed and rectified. In the recent years we have observed that corporations are keen on virtualizing their server landscape. Since Virtualizing resources pays way for tapping the potential of cloud computing, DR on cloud becomes a key area of interest to enterprises. This holds very true in the current scenario wherein DATA CENTER Consolidation is a key focus stream across enterprises irrespective of the industry they belong to. Since ensuring security on cloud is quite challenging, it is vital that corporates have a deep understanding of the various security aspects related to cloud. Thus this paper catches the inputs on operational level details from professionals working on cloud based solutions and tries to outline the challenges faced and best practices that has to be looked upon in adopting Cloud based DR model.