Assessing Disaster Recovery Alternatives: On-Site, Colocation or Cloud

Abstract

Every organization requires a business continuity plan (BCP) or disaster recovery plan (DRP) which falls within the cost constraints while achieving the target recovery requirement's in terms of recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). The organizations must identify the likely events that can cause disasters and evaluate their impact. They need to set the objectives clearly, evaluate feasible /DRPs to choose the one that would be optimal. Here we examine tradeoffs involved in choosing among the disaster recovery options. The optimal disaster recovery planning should take into consideration the key parameters including the initial cost, the cost of data transfers, and the cost of data storage. To evaluate the risk, the types of disaster (natural or human-caused) need to be identified along with the probability of a disaster occurrence and the costs of corresponding failures needs to be evaluated. An appropriate approach for the cost evaluation needs to be determined to allow a quantitative assessment of currently active disaster recovery plans (DRP) in terms of the time need to restore the service (associated with RTO) and possible loss of data (associated with RPO).