Businesses suffer through various inevitable pitfalls, but some of the worst that could happen is a disruption of software applications that operations heavily rely on. Disaster strikes in unprecedented ways, which affects not only business’ continuity, but your customers’ experience.
Be it an outage in your network, bugs in your code, or load balancing mistakes, downtime can bring your business to a painstaking halt. You lose not only time but customers and revenue. For this reason, having a disaster recovery (DR) plan is integral.
It needs to ensure your cloud infrastructure stays secure and your load balancing issues at bay. Moreover, it should ensure a quick and efficient recovery. To come up with a robust disaster recovery plan, here is a step-by-step guide for you:
Step 1: Determine Your Recovery Goals
Your disaster recovery plan shouldn’t just be made as a one-size-fits-all strategy. To ensure that it actually delivers, you need to come up with recovery goals that address specific instances. Prioritizing analysis and log data, for instance, may set aside the speedy recovery of data.
The key is to become aware of the many different factors that affect overall recovery. You can then harness them and specify them as goals—only then will you be able to come up with a strategy that works.
Step 2: Focus on Incorporating Security Measures
Once you’ve identified your recovery goals, direct your attention to security measures. Disaster recovery also means prioritizing the integrity of your data, which could come in the form of backing up processes or archiving.
Recovery techniques focus mainly on the speedy recovery of data. Speed is crucial to business continuity, allowing your business to bounce back without any repercussions. Here are the three different speed recovery data techniques:
• Hot sites
These allow your company to recover in minutes. The application and database used are hosted on remote services, where real-time data replication is used. Unfortunately, this method is expensive due to the need for a dedicated site and the creation of an infrastructure.
• Cold sites
These do not require the use of any server-related equipment. They provide power, cooling, and space, especially during outages.
• Warm sites
These make use of incremental backups, which gives way to recovery. Unfortunately, warm sites take a long time to bring online, so some data loss will be inevitable.
Step 3: Make Use of Server Load Balancing
Load balanced data have been steadily paving the way into being an integral part of disaster recovery plans. Load balancers are often already installed in cloud applications, so when disaster strikes, cloud owners and providers can use load balancers to transfer them to other data centers.
Load balancers will ensure a reliable uptime even with high traffic in the live data centers. DNS-based load balancers are typically offered, being fast, efficient, and reliable. These allow you to quickly and easily switch the traffic to live data centers.
Step 4: Take Note of Other Considerations
With a disaster recovery plan in mind, you can begin identifying areas in your load balancing that need work, such as recognizing which servers need to be rerouted to live servers. You also need to keep in mind that you have to sync all the configuration details among your data servers to keep things running smoothly. A centralized system could help keep these details, such as IP addresses, server names, load balancer rules, and other important metadata to be synced among your servers.
To test your load balancing system, you can include conducting a mock disaster event in your disaster recovery plan to ensure that the system runs smoothly and is free from various sources of error, whether in configurations or human errors. If your system isn’t checked for these errors, you may end up losing valuable data and other resources.
Secure Your Future—Invest in A Load Balancing Software
Planning for an unpredictable future may seem like too much work to take on, especially when dealing with a business that never seems to stop. Business growth is of the utmost priority, but failing to plan for disasters will set your milestones back.
There are simply parts of your business that are non-negotiable, and in a blink of an eye an unprecedented disaster can take those away. It is therefore vital to invest in a disaster recovery plan, particularly one that minimizes load balancing issues and secures your overall infrastructure.
With that being said, invest in load balancer products today. Resonate offers the best ones on the market, as we are dedicated to finding resolutions to various demands, such as slow performing applications and systems.
To enable your business to operate at maximum capacity, our solutions ensure that you run with fast application performance and high availability. Cost-effective, reliable, and innovative, we’ll help you achieve growth. Contact us today to learn more.