Posted: September 4th, 2022

State- of- the- art Technology for Disaster Recovery

Computer Sciences and Information Technology
State- of- the- art Technology for Disaster Recovery:
Cloud Computing Technologies
Research the speculations on where the state-of-the-art will be in the near future for one of the following technologies. Your paper should include a description of the state-of-the-art in your technology, a discussion of where the sources that you read believe the technology is heading in the near future, and a discussion of how this technology will affect the choices you would make if you were making purchase recommendations for a client. Although there is room for personal opinion in your paper, you must justify your conclusions. Utilize Help write my thesis – APA 7th Ed.
Abstract
Disaster recovery remains a persistent challenge in organizational IT systems. However, the challenge has seen the implementation of virtualized cloud computing technologies for the function. A considerable amount of literature has been published to demonstrate the benefits accrued by users who choose to use this state of the art technology as their disaster recovery solution. In this research, we explore this technology and the research to understand why organizations need to consider technology as their solution. Notably, cloud computing platforms have a pay-as-you-go model, which ensures that users incur lower costs, have minimal recovery times, and utilize minimum resources in ensuring business continuity even after the disaster has occurred. The paper has provided an extensive literature on disaster recovery as an issue for organizations and information on cloud computing environments. The research has also outlined the open issues, which are significant determinants of the technology’s future trajectory concerning disaster recovery.

INTRODUCTION
The increasing reliance of society on computer systems that even shorter downtimes can lead to extensive financial losses and, at times, the loss of human lives (Wood et al., 2010). Different businesses and government services have looked to implement disaster recovery systems to reduce the downtime suffered from catastrophic failures within the systems. The current disaster recovery strategies range from periodic tape backups to trucked offsite to the consistent synchronizations of data replicated in different geographic sites. However, in the provision of disaster recovery services, their main challenge remains in achieving business continuity. The systems and respective applications are rapidly restored in the occurrence of a failure (Wood et al., 2010). The disaster recovery strategy should provide business continuity by reducing recovery time and restoring the disaster’s lost information. However, the latter objective has been seen to happen in exorbitant expenses.
Nonetheless, virtualized cloud platforms are a state of the art technology providing disaster recovery solutions at low costs and beneficial in achieving business continuity. One of the platforms if the “Pay-as-you-go” model, which could reduce the cost of disaster recovery since distinct amounts of resources are required before and after the occurrence of a disaster happening (Wood et al., 2010). In typical operating conditions, the cloud service platforms for disaster will require a small share of resources for synchronizing the primary sites into the cloud. The extensive amount of resources is used in running applications and are paid for and provisioned on the occurrence of a disaster. Using automated virtualization platforms indicates that the additional resources can be purchased rapidly online when the disaster has been detected (Wood et al., 2010). This dramatically reduces the recovery time in the event of a failure, a fundamental element for business continuity.
This research paper seeks to explore the virtualized cloud computing platforms for disaster recovery in organizational systems. In this thesis, the author intends to understand the benefits of incorporating the state of the art technology as a disaster recovery solution and its limitations. The research will first discuss the disaster recovery challenges facing the organization’s systems and why it needs to be addressed adequately. A theoretical review of disaster recovery and cloud computing technologies will be done before a systematic review and analysis of extensive scholarly literature to explore the validity of virtualized cloud computing platforms as a disaster recovery solution.
Background Information on Disaster recovery and Virtualized Cloud Computing Platforms
Changing technologies have bolstered a need for robust methods of low cost and a limited burden on enterprises’ data recovery processes. IT systems are prone to numerous disasters. These disasters will come in various forms, including; natural disasters, failures in critical applications, network failures, intrusions within networks, hacking, or other malicious activities and system failures (Gharat & Mhamunkar, 2015). However, when the disaster happens, such as a system crash or a failure in power connectivity, organizations are more likely to lose massive amounts of information, including sensitive and confidential data resulting in extensive losses (Gharat & Mhamunkar, 2015). The disruptions that arise from these disasters can be costly for the organization as it tries to recover and restore normalcy. Therefore, it has become essential for systems to have disaster recovery techniques for business continuity purposes. The organization will require a documented disaster recovery procedure developed and communicated to all the system users with tests carried out to ensure their effectiveness.
The advancements in both applications and the presence of several devices have governed rise to the development of backup and disaster recovery plans that will provide better data integrity, capacity to handle many devices simultaneously, and efficient data recovery. Failure to have these procedures will mean that the company is setting itself up for more significant financial impact, legal actions, and lower production levels that could cause business collapse. The parameters considered to determine how effective a disaster recovery strategy includes the Recovery Time Objective, Recovery Point Objective, the age of backup, performance, consistency, the time taken to backup and recover, and the total costs associated with the strategy.
Cloud computing is described as the provision of services through the supply of IT resources via the internet. The respective services and resources are utilized in a pay as you go manner so that its users can use the service without needing to install the cloud applications on the machines (Al-Dahaj et al., 2017). Cloud computing users get various benefits in terms of decreased infrastructure resource expenses and improvements in developing the applications due to the savings from eliminating the need for IT maintenance as the cloud providers manage it. The virtualization technique is the underlying basis of cloud computing, which entails cloud software insulation from the underlying hardware resources (Al-Dahaj et al., 2017). The isolation allows data availability in the vent of the destruction of Infrastructure.
Notably, virtualized cloud service platforms are increasingly being incorporated as backup and data recovery solutions. While small enterprises consider the internet-based platforms, the strategy has been found to provide a secure and reliable environment via automated backup and storage procedures. One of its real benefits is its ability to provide on-demand services. Even when an organization faces a disaster, it can quickly pay and access its information lost and restored to its business continuity systems.
Problem Statement
The failure to invest in a disaster recovery technique puts an organization at risk of being vulnerable to interruptions and operational failures, leading to the permanent firm’s closure. Additionally, the lack of disaster recovery could devastate the universal economy due to its substantial contribution to its well-being. Therefore, looking for the best disaster recovery technique workable for an organization is necessary to reduce the negative impacts. The organizations at risk could easily have a wrong perspective on the likelihood and probability of the disasters and act as if they will not happen. However, there is not enough information about the process of making risky choices, especially when there are ways to protect oneself. Therefore, it is imperative to discuss and understand the virtualized cloud computing technology that is being considered by organizations seeking to improve their disaster recovery processes and mitigating the risk of failing to invest in one.
Research Objective and Question
This thesis is focussed on highlighting the importance and significance of improvising the virtualized cloud computing technique as a state of the art disaster recovery technology with particular reference to small and medium enterprises. This study will examine the present and future status of the cloud in regards to disaster recovery. The difference in acceptance of the technique was mainly cost and security. However, technological advancements have ensured that costs are reduced, and safety is maximized. Therefore, the research seeks to ensure that the organization considers it as an effective technique.
To this effect, the primary research questions are:
● Why is the virtualized Cloud Computing Technique preferable as a disaster recovery solution?
Research Limitations
The research related to cloud computing is extensively comprehensive, making it challenging to cover all aspects of adopting or avoiding its improvisation. Nonetheless, this research was established on the assumption that cloud computing technologies positively correlate to data security, backup, and recovery from the cloud. Therefore, the study would concentrate more on those issues to illustrate its benefit as a disaster recovery technique.
Research Structure
The remaining sections of this research document have incorporated the following organization. The second section presents its theoretical review regarding disaster recovery techniques and adopting a cloud computing technique for the aforementioned purpose. The third section presents the research methodology, which encompasses selecting the research methodology, data collection methods, and analysis. Also, it stipulates the criteria to undertake and evaluate the information. The fourth section discusses the data analysis concerning the research question and considers the theoretical review discussed in the study. Finally, the final sections will present the research findings, conclusions, reflective thoughts on the research process, and its recommendation.
Definition of Terms
Disaster Recovery Technology: These are the implemented technologies by organizations to recover systems from minor or significant interruptions arising from various disasters.
Business Continuity Planning: The plans implemented to ensure critical business operations are constantly available to key stakeholders who always need to access them.
Cloud Computing: According to The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), this is a model to enable the convenient on-demand network access to configurable computing resources within a shared pool. The resources can be quickly be provided and released with a minimum management effort, not interaction with service providers.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO): This represents the point in which the current backup process of a system happened before any failure.
Recovery Time Objective: This is an extraneous business decision specifying abound on then length of time it will take for an application to be restored online in the occurrence of a failure. The measurement considers the disaster detection time, preparation of needed servers for backup, initialization of the failed systems, and the reconfiguration of network needs to reroute requests from previous sites to the backup location.
THEORETICAL REVIEW
This section will review various research concerning disaster recovery for IT systems in organizations and the adoption of virtualized cloud computing techniques for the aforementioned purpose.
Disaster Recovery Techniques
Pathirage et al. (2007) stated that there is an importance in sharing knowledge and ensuring that disaster information if readily available and reliable. Their research indicates that the need to share disaster knowledge is still at the individual labels, and coordination is needed in distinct groups. This world ensures that the stakeholders are adequately informed and prepared to mitigate the risks associated with disasters and provide better warnings. Notably, the prospect theory indicates that users will decide based on the gains and losses related to the proposed alternatives concerning the reference point (Ashfar, 2014). The perception of something will be affected by intuitive heuristics, but it is still influenced by the nature of mental framing on a problem, considered the reference point. Many factors will affect this reference point, hence the many decisions made for a particular problem (Ashfar, 2014). Concerning disaster recovery techniques, it is evident that an enterprise will decide based on its perception of the challenge. An organization that views potential disasters to their IT systems as huge risks will take prompt and effective action to mitigate the negative impacts. In this case, when the organizations she and equip themselves with the right knowledge on disasters and understand their impact on their organizations, they will put mo0re focus on mitigating their occurrence.
According to Yarrapothu (2015), the disaster recovery technique implemented depends on the organization’s requirements such that they design a methodology that will provide better output accordingly. Therefore the requirements will include significant information that contributes to having a voracious and accurate selection of technology. The information will consist of the promised recovery times, organizational limits that can be handled in case of data losses, necessary backup types and are they in line with the organization’s applications, application of remote storage techniques, the cysts of the technology, and whether it fulfills the organization’s needs concerning the enterprise (Yarrapothu, 2015). Nonetheless, with the changing technologies that change trends, there will always be a need for a better system. It is possible to have a system that compromises on a particular characteristic of its gains on another character to a greater extent. However, the challenge is giving an opinion on which strategy will suit an organization without any extensive understanding of all the requirements in their entirety and vitality. Therefore, as tech-savvy individuals and scholars work on constant improvements, it is possible to find emerging new needs inline with their organization requirements.
Cloud Computing
According to Ambrust et al. (2010), cloud computing is the promising technology that shifts information and computational services from individual devices into the distributed architectures. Initially, the cloud’s content was developed for describing groups of complex on-demand services provided by the respective commercial providers. Depending on network topology and their advancements of high-speed bandwidth and smartphones, users are allowed to upload data via the internet (Khoshkholgh et al., 2014). Through virtualization, cloud computing technology can alter the system’s view from the hardware to a dynamic and flexible entity. The services are divided into three levels, such as the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), software as a Service (SaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS). The fundamental element in a cloud can be described as the on-demand self-service, complete access to networks, pooling resources, rapid elasticity, measured service, and taxonomy (Mell, 2011).
Research is done by Yarapothu (2015), which compares two backup and disaster recovery techniques: tape and cloud platforms, indicated that the latter was more effective as a solution in various parameters. These included the lower total costs incurred in ownership especially considering the capital expenses; they are easier to deploy compared to the traditional solutions that are more complex due to the more software or agents required, the cloud is flexible for having login credentials that user used to access the information remotely, easier upgrades and lower occurrence of downtimes (Yarapothu, 2015). The traditional solution -tape-based- is very involved in logistics, making them challenging in performing recovery drills. Cloud-based solutions provide an easier way to conduct recovery drills and assess their effectiveness.
Wood et al. (2010) indicated that there are numerous benefits of using cloud platforms for disaster recovery, but it also depends on the system’s applications. The research suggested that the technique is beneficial in cost to applications with a 200-second order recovery times. Low-cost servers can be used while undertaking state replications to normal conditions and powerful ones after a disaster. The cloud also brings further economic benefits by multiplexing its replication server for many applications, reducing normal operations costs. The pay-as-you-go model, the addition of cloud resources with sufficient granularity, and the maintenance of the servers and storage devices by the cloud providers benefit its users economically (Wood et al., 2010). Virtualization itself does present its benefits in relation to disaster recovery, which includes easy automation that reduces the recovery times, elimination of hardware dependencies, thus reducing the need for hardware at the backup sites and the application-agnostic state replication software able to run outside of the virtual machine will allow it to be treated as a black box (Wood et al., 2010). These characteristics are why replicating and redeploying resources for a cloud disaster recovery solution is easier and will allow business continuity in shorter recovery times.
According to Jian-hua & Nan (2011), the continuity of applications and security of information is determined by the disaster recovery system’s structure, typically distributed computing, centralized storage. The different requirements will have disaster recovery coming in three levels; data-level, system-level, and application-level.

Figure 1: The Typical Architecture of a Disaster Recovery System

Source: (Jian-hua & Nan, 2011)

Notably, from the technical perspective and trends, the cloud storage architecture will provide benefits such as high reliability, performance rates, and ease in expanding among others (Jian-hua & Nan, 2011). The online backup service based on cloud storage will provide dynamism in scheduling, a standardized access interface, and preferred online backup service programs. The internet allows connections to cloud storage by users, which is usually private cloud storage. This is generally developed behind a company’s firewall and will utilize all its hardware, software, and enterprise information stored in it. The researcher goes on to state that disaster recovery needs to be in three different geographical locations. Suppose the private cloud storage has all the disaster recovery and redundant backup systems. In that case, it does not fit the strict sense of a cloud due to lack of thoroughness in reforming resources and having characteristics such as heavy local configuration, huge costs, low flexibility, among other non-cloud computing properties (Jian-hua & Nan, 2011). The rational and rigorous approach allows private clouds to share a standard/public cloud storage service. The latter services are placed in numerous private clouds, hence called the “inter-private cloud storage.” This provides the enterprise with a private cloud with special storage services, and disaster recovery backups while users get a mobile service that is convenient and efficient.
Figure 2: The Model of a Disaster Recovery System in Cloud

Source: (Jian-hua & Nan, 2011)
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
This section outlines the research methodology adopted in the study, which mainly encompassed the systematic review of literature on various databases with peer-reviewed information. Therefore, the central databases would be Google Scholar, Springer Online Journal Collections, ScienceDirect Backfiles, and Emerald. The search encompassed the utilization of key terms related to the research subject; in this case, these key terms were virtualized cloud computing, disaster recovery, and business continuity. The selected articles satisfied the inclusion criteria incorporated by the research. First, the author reviewed the title and abstract, which needs to be a study generally related to cloud computing, disaster recovery, and business continuity. The second step of the review of articles followed the study’s inclusion criteria needing an evaluation component outlined in its methodology and research discussion. Notably, articles that primarily focused on cloud computing, disaster recovery, or business continuity separately without integrating the three aspects were excluded from the research.
After selecting the articles, these researchers’ primary perspectives and findings would be considered in this systematic review. The author was seeking to understand how the researcher depicted the correlation between the three aspects. This would lead to an analysis of this information, mainly to identify the consistencies or inconsistencies in their findings. These attributes would be used to inform this research discussion, demonstrate its conclusive results, and give its recommendation.
RESEARCH DISCUSSION
In the past decade, cloud computing technologies have expanded from a brand-new service paradigm into the preferred technology for virtualized services. The virtualization assets and services it offers are online, robust, and scalable. The technology also boosts IT capabilities due to the innovative form of its services. The present small and medium enterprises increasingly understand the importance of using cloud technologies due to the immediate access to the most effective business applications at a lower cost. The Cloud Industry Forum has presented current statistics that indicate that cloud services have become more popular day by day. 61% of UK companies have adopted cloud services, increasing from 13% in 2011.
Notably, the increasing demand for the technologies has seen the users also deploy it or disaster recovery strategy, which has turned into an incredible strategy. Backup is typically data supplication done to protect the information in case of its loss or destruction. A backup system will provide information security from human errors, challenges in hardware, and natural disasters. The right backup system for an organization is aligned to the real scenario in case of a disaster. Key indicators considered include the rapid growth and developments in IT, information systems’ scale, integrations, and management productivity, affecting the core development. Also, numerous services increasingly depend on the IT systems, and some of them are essential to clients and communities, such as financial and healthcare services. Such businesses understand that even a short downtime of the loss of small data amounts will cause considerable financial deficits and social issues.
Disaster recovery is among IT data centers’ fundamental functions, with its scope growing significantly due to changes in business functions. Disaster recovery planning goes on to be a significant element in any operating enterprise as they understand the service interruptions that arise from human-made or natural disasters. The traditional and cloud-based service models are unique disaster recovery models deployed to prevent network breakdowns (Matar & Fakhri, 2016). In the use of cloud models for disaster responses, the respective architecture will have three layers:
● The Cloud Application (SaaS), the user-friendly interface, allows organizations to update their datasets on disasters without t5he requirement to utilize complex applications (Al-Dahash et al., 2017).
● The Management layer processes and analyzes collected information by the user interface(the cloud application layers). It informs the decision-making process in case of a disaster, which would also include decisions to activate earning alerts to the response organizations and the users in the affected area.
● Cloud Infrastructure, which has the cloud hardware resources and database storage, stores all the collected information (Al-Dahash et al., 2017).
Choosing to use virtualized cloud computing platforms for disaster recovery will present various benefits, including faster turnaround time, minimal expenses used during downtimes, and lesser complexities. The cloud will make the cold site disaster recovery function antiquated. The warm site disaster recovery done through the cloud remains a cost-effective alternative as the backup to critical servers could be restored within a few minutes in a shared or private cloud (Wood et al., 2010). The SAN to SAN replication happening between the sites will ensure a short recovery period. This capability cannot be provided by conventional disaster recovery models due to costs and conducting tests. Also, disaster recovery in the cloud can give multi-site availability and ensure that the production site is returned after the disaster has been entirely handled. The disaster recovery platform through the cloud provides the users with the capacity to fine-tune both costs and performance on the forum. The servers and applications considered to be less critical in the disaster are turned down with lesser resources while giving assurance to the essential applications to get more resources hence ensuring business continuity (Owen, 2019). Business continuity is a primary concern for the disaster recovery options since the corporation will have an assurance of recovering its systems and procedures, prompting its continuation.
Nonetheless, disaster recovery in the cloud has raised issues on how secure the environment is, considering an increase in information on organizations and their consumers within the resources. Security and privacy concerns are a considerable boundary for why a user will consider using cloud computing systems. However, these challenges happen when there is insufficient certification, authorization, audit management, vulnerable encryption algorithms, risk of association, and inadequate disaster recovery. It is essential then the user looks to incorporate quality cloud service platforms are carried out regular monitoring to ensure that the issues are minimized and have their information secure and confidential.
CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
From this research, it is evident that cloud computing technologies need to be incorporated by organizations as their disaster recovery solutions due to their numerous benefits not provided by the conventional models. An empirical review of appropriate literature has proven an increase in the adoption of technologies for various reasons. Notably, disaster recovery and business continuity are functions effectively handled by technology, and users should consider it. However, before its adoption, the user needs to ensure that the technology will meet its organization requirements and looks for a source that adequately meets those needs. While it is recommended that a user looks into this solution, it is prudent to understand that the technology is still in its infancy stages, and more knowledge is required in it. Currently, various open issues that need to be considered, which will play significant roles in its future direction, include maximization of the utilization of resources, privacy and confidentiality, disaster monitoring, and resource scheduling (Khoshkholghiet al., 2014).

References
Afshar, F. (2014). Investigating the Determinants of Disaster Recovery Technology Investment Choice in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises.
Al-Dahash, H. F., Al-Shammari, S., Kulatunga, U., & Hardman, M. D. (2017, September). Cloud computing for disaster response management stemming from terrorism in Iraq. In 13th IPGRC 2017 Full Conference Proceedings (pp. 295-306). The University of Salford.
Armbrust, M., Fox, A., Griffith, R., Joseph, A. D., Katz, R., Konwinski, A., … Zaharia, M. (2010). Above the Clouds: A View of Cloud Computing. Communications of the ACM, 53(4), 50-58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1721654.1721672
Gharat, A. A., & Mhamunkar, D. E. (2015). Disaster recovery in cloud computing. International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Engineering & Technology (IJARCET), 5(4), 1796-1801.
Jian-hua, Z., & Nan, Z. (2011). Cloud Computing-based Data Storage and Disaster Recovery. 2011 International Conference on Future Computer Science and Education. doi:10.1109/icfcse.2011.157
Khoshkholghi, M. A., Abdullah, A., Latip, R., & Subramaniam, S. (2014). Disaster recovery in cloud computing: A survey.
Matar, A. M., & Fakhri, A. I. (2016). Data recovery and business continuity in Cloud computing: A Review of the Research Literature. International Journal of Advancements in Computing technology.
Mell, P., & Grance, T. (2011). The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing, NIST Special Publication, Special publication 800-145. http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf.
Owen. (2019, October 22). The benefits of disaster recovery in cloud computing. Retrieved from https://www.otava.com/reference/the-benefits-of-disaster-recovery-in-cloud-computing/
Pathirage, C. P., Amaratunga, R. D. G., & Haigh, R. P. (2007). Knowledge sharing in disaster management strategies: Sri Lankan post-tsunami context. In CIB World Building Congress: Construction for Development, 14-17 May 2007, Cape Town International Conference Centre. (pp. 2981-2993)
Wood, T., Cecchet, E., Ramakrishnan, K. K., Shenoy, P. J., van der Merwe, J. E., & Venkataramani, A. (2010). Disaster recovery as a cloud service: economic benefits & deployment challenges. HotCloud, 10, 8-15.
Yarrapothu, S. (2015). Effectiveness of Backup and Disaster Recovery in Cloud: A Comparative study on Tape and Cloud-based Backup and Disaster Recovery.

Order | Check Discount

Tags: State- of- the- art Technology for Disaster Recovery