Cloud-native disaster recovery is a modern approach of DR that is low-cost and on-demand as it is optimised to make the best use of cloud resources for guaranteed business continuity, scalability and cost-effectiveness.

Disaster recovery (DR) allows an organisation to resume normal operations in the event of a disaster that could affect access to data, hardware and software, power, networking equipment and connectivity. Before the advent of cloud, having a disaster recovery plan, which would include having a replicated data centre in case a failover was required, was something that only the biggest and richest companies could afford. Historically, DR has always been a necessary, but expensive and complex area of IT for companies to implement.

Over the years, cloud has democratised a lot of things; disaster recovery being one of them. Cloud-native disaster recovery makes DR more accessible and affordable, allowing companies to be better prepared for a disaster at a fraction of the cost of legacy DR solutions. For instance, organisations are able to leverage the following strengths of the cloud:

• Instead of purchasing and upkeeping dedicated DR hardware or offsite data centre, companies can opt for a much cheaper OpEx disaster recovery subscription model.
• DR is made simpler and more scalable. Businesses no longer need to provision, configure and test their DR plans in-house.
• DR coverage can be expanded to not only cover the most mission-critical on-prem applications/workloads, but also cloud VMs and SaaS applications.
• Applications and workloads can be recovered in the cloud seamlessly within minutes, with significantly lower RPOs and RTOs.

The availability of low-cost DR in the form of cloud-native disaster recovery solutions means that DR should no longer be an afterthought for today’s data-driven organisations, big and small. One way to look at it is to factor in the impact of downtime to the business if it does not have a disaster recovery plan – which could in fact be disastrous.