With the ever-growing reliance on technology, businesses are increasingly exposed to the risk of data loss due to disasters, whether they occur in an on-premises setting, a public data center (IaaS), or a Cloud Service Provider (CSP). It is crucial to take extra measures to protect business data, as disasters can occur at any time and can have severe consequences for the organization.
In December 2022, Alibaba Cloud, the third largest infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider, experienced a major outage resulting in the shutdown of many regional services, including a major cryptocurrency exchange and the Monetary Authority of Macau’s website. This blog will examine this event as an example of why cloud users must include redundancy in their cloud Disaster Recovery plans.
The recent outage experienced by Alibaba Cloud highlights the importance of implementing redundancy in cloud Disaster Recovery plans. The outage was caused by a refrigeration equipment failure in the PCCW IDC site and resulted in a shutdown of many regional services, including a major cryptocurrency exchange and the Monetary Authority of Macau’s website. According to TechCrunch, this was one of the longest and most serious cloud outages in recent Chinese cloud provider history, lasting up to a day for some customers.
It is important to note that cloud computing companies, no matter how large they are, are still susceptible to outages, and clouds do not offer 100% uptime. The cost of downtime for businesses affected by outages is significant, with more than 60% of outages costing businesses more than $100,000, according to the Uptime Institute's 2022 Outage Analysis Report.
While some Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) advertize guaranteed uptime, this typically means they offer small rebates if the SLA is not met, usually in the form of fee discounts. This in no way covers the loss of revenue, brand damage, and lost productivity caused by the outage. Therefore, it is the user's responsibility to implement additional redundancy through resilient applications such as Disaster Recovery (DR) to ensure resiliency during outages.
To protect critical databases in the cloud, implementing out-of-region DR for business-critical databases is a viable solution that mitigates risk and helps meet data loss and recovery speed requirements across all disaster scenarios, including regional outages. Alibaba Cloud offers Zonal Redundancy, which enables users to run their applications over a cross-zone deployment so they can failover within a region, or a more resilient out-of-region standby.
For SQL Server and Oracle SE customers, Standby MultiPlatform (MP) is a solution that enables out-of-region disaster recovery quickly and easily, whether hosted on-premises or in the cloud. StandbyMP employs physical replication technology to create a standby database in a different geographical location that is constantly updated, verified, and ready for failover at any time. The implementation of StandbyMP takes hours rather than days or weeks and ensures rapid recovery without needing backups or scripts. Overall, protecting critical databases in the cloud does not have to be costly or complicated, and users must have complete confidence in their Disaster Recovery plans.
If you are on Oracle Standard Edition or SQL Server Standard Edition and are interested in learning more about our solution, you can contact one of our team members today! Alternatively, we also have a Test Drive environment that is already pre-installed and ready to do.
