Cloud Standby: Disaster Recovery of Distributed Systems in the Cloud

Disaster recovery planning and securing business processes against outtakes have been essential parts of running a company for decades. As IT systems became more important, and especially since more and more revenue is generated over the Internet, securing the IT systems that support the business processes against outages is essential. Using fully operational standby sites with periodically updated standby systems is a well-known approach to prepare against disasters. Setting up and maintaining a second datacenter is, however, expensive. In this work, we present Cloud Standby, a warm standby approach for setting up and updating a standby system in the Cloud. We describe the architecture of Cloud Standby and its methods for deploying and updating the standby system. We show that by using Cloud Standby the recovery time and long-term costs of disaster recovery can significantly be reduced.