Disaster Recovery as a Cloud Service: Economic Benefits & Deployment Challenges

Many businesses rely on Disaster Recovery (DR) services to prevent either manmade or natural disasters from causing expensive service disruptions. Unfortunately, current DR services come either at very high cost, or with only weak guarantees about the amount of data lost or time required to restart operation after a failure. In this work, we argue that cloud computing platforms are well suited for offering DR as a service due to their pay-as-you-go pricing model that can lower costs, and their use of automated virtual platforms that can minimize the recovery time after a failure. To this end, we perform a pricing analysis to estimate the cost of running a public cloud based DR service and show significant cost reductions compared to using privately owned resources. Further, we explore what additional functionality must be exposed by current cloud platforms and describe what challenges remain in order to minimize cost, data loss, and recovery time in cloud based DR services.