Technology underpins practically every part of a business today, but the more we rely on our tools, networks, and applications, the more we have to lose if they fail us. That is why every business needs a plan to quickly restore and recover IT systems in the event of a failure – in other words, a disaster recovery plan.

In a hybrid cloud environment, ensuring both disaster recovery and high availability is critical for maintaining business continuity, especially when integrating on-premises data centers with cloud providers. A well-architected disaster recovery (DR) plan typically involves replicating critical workloads and data across both on-premises infrastructure and cloud resources, with the cloud serving as a secondary or primary site that can be rapidly scaled in the event of an outage. This setup ensures that if a disaster occurs at the primary data center or in the cloud, workloads can be quickly redirected seamlessly to available infrastructure, minimizing downtime and data loss. With fabric connect and direct connect services—such as those offered by major data center and cloud providers like Equinix, AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud—enterprises can establish low-latency, high-throughput network connections that seamlessly link on-premises data centers with cloud environments, creating a hybrid infrastructure that is both reliable and resilient.

High availability (HA) is also essential in this hybrid cloud model, as it ensures that applications and services remain operational even during hardware failures, network issues, or other disruptions. Cloud-native HA features, such as automatic load balancing, fault tolerance, and the ability to distribute workloads across multiple availability zones or regions, complement the on-premises infrastructure. Direct Connect services allow for private, dedicated network paths between the on-premises environment and the cloud, enhancing both performance and security while reducing reliance on the public internet. When combined with robust disaster recovery plans, high availability strategies in a hybrid cloud environment enable organizations to not only recover quickly from failures but also maintain operational continuity, scalability, and security across their hybrid infrastructure.

The benefits of a disaster recovery plan

A disaster recovery (DR) plan reduces damage or disruption and ensures recovery as quickly as possible in the event of a disaster that leads to system failure. The goal is to minimize the costs resulting from losses of, or damage to, the resources or capabilities of your IT facilities.

Creating a disaster recovery plan can also have immediate benefits. For instance, because developing the plan involves conducting an audit of your IT assets and agreements, you will better understand the IT structure, know who is responsible for which assets, and when they need to recover systems and restore backups.

Create an effective disaster recovery plan

Your disaster recovery plan might look good on paper, but without practical backing to support its implementation and activation, it is unlikely to live up to its promise.