Toward cost effective and optimal selection of IT disaster recovery cloud solution

Many organizations rely on Disaster Recovery services to ensure availability and continuity of their operations during undesired circumstances and outages. Business Impact Analysis concept enables adequate planning for business continuation as it delivers essential information on services' criticality levels and their impact on business. The advancement in communication and technology has reshaped the development of Disaster Recovery solutions over cloud that become an attractive approach and fundamental part to sustain business operations. Organizations should select the model that best balances the level of control, software configuration, maintenance, and cost. In this paper, we explore Disaster Recovery architecture in term of hardware, software, data replication, networking, and access points. Further, the paper identifies key challenges, benefits, security concerns, and protections methodologies for Disaster Recovery cloud solution. Additionally, we present our illustrative cost analysis of different type of Disaster Recovery solutions based on cost of assets, operating cost, and cost of failures.