Redefining Recovery: The Efficiency of Cloud Rewind’s Rebuild Approach

In the dynamic landscape of cloud computing, organizations are increasingly reliant on robust recovery strategies for resilience and uninterrupted service delivery. One approach that has been traditionally adopted is the pre-creation of a cloud landing zone.

However, this method is fraught with inefficiencies and potential pitfalls that can undermine its effectiveness and cost organizations time, resources, and operational resilience. This blog delves into the concept of a cloud landing zone, highlights the challenges associated with pre-creating such zones for cyber recovery (CR) and disaster recovery (DR), and introduces Cloud Rewind’s rebuild model as an alternative for enabling cloud resilience.

What Is a Cloud Landing Zone?

A cloud landing zone is a pre-configured environment within a cloud account designed to manage cloud resources securely and efficiently. It provides a structured framework for cloud resource deployment, network configuration, and security settings, aligning with best practices and organizational policies. The intent is to facilitate smooth, scalable, and compliant cloud operations.

While cloud landing zones serve as the foundation for deploying and managing cloud resources, their application in CR/DR scenarios presents several challenges.

Challenges with Pre-Created Cloud Landing Zones for CR/DR

• Time and resource consumption: Creating a cloud landing zone requires a comprehensive understanding of the existing production environment’s architecture and maintenance practices. This replication effort demands substantial time and resources, duplicating efforts and diverting them from value-generating activities.
• Maintenance and configuration drift: Once established, a pre-built landing zone necessitates ongoing maintenance to stay in alignment with the production environment. However, the dynamic nature of cloud environments often leads to configuration drift – a divergence in the settings and configurations between the production and CR/DR environments. This drift complicates maintenance efforts and can compromise the efficacy of the recovery strategy.
• Impediments to testing: The divergence between production and CR/DR environments due to drift and misalignment hampers the ability to conduct effective recovery testing. The hesitancy or inability to test recoveries undermines the resilience of IT systems, leaving organizations vulnerable in the event of a disaster or cyberattack.
• Wasted investments: The resources expended on creating and maintaining a pre-created landing zone can be substantial, yet the return on investment (ROI) is often minimal. Organizations may find themselves with outdated or misaligned recovery environments that are not ready for immediate use after a disaster or incident. Furthermore, in the face of sophisticated ransomware attacks, the ability to rebuild systems from clean data and application images is crucial – a capability that is hampered by the constraints of a pre-created landing zone.

The Cloud Rewind Approach to Cloud Resilience: Rebuild

Cloud Rewind’s rebuild model for cloud resilience offers a more agile, efficient, and effective approach CR/DR. Unlike the traditional model of pre-creating and maintaining a cloud landing zone, Cloud Rewind allows for dynamically rebuilding cloud environments from clean copies of data and application images. This model addresses the core challenges associated with pre-created landing zones:

• Efficiency and agility: By eliminating the need for a pre-created landing zone, organizations can allocate resources more efficiently, focusing on strategic initiatives rather than maintenance and alignment efforts.
• Reduced configuration drift: The rebuild model mitigates the risk of configuration drift by verifying that the recovery environment is constructed with the latest, clean configurations and data, closely mirroring the production environment at the time of rebuild.
• Enhanced testing and recovery: The dynamic nature of the rebuild approach facilitates more frequent and realistic testing of CR/DR procedures, enhancing IT system resilience.
• Cost-effectiveness: Without the sunk cost of maintaining a pre-created landing zone, organizations can achieve better ROI on their investments, focusing on rapid CR/DR capabilities that are more aligned with modern cloud practices.

In the context of increasing cyber threats like ransomware, the ability to rapidly rebuild a clean environment is invaluable. Cloud Rewind allows organizations to swiftly respond to such threats, minimizing downtime and enabling continuous business.

Rebuild: A Forwarding-Thinking Approach

The traditional approach of pre-creating cloud landing zones for CR/DR is fraught with inefficiencies, including wasted resources, maintenance challenges, and compromised resilience. In contrast, Commvault Cloud Rewind’s on-demand rebuild model for cloud resilience offers a more agile, cost-effective, and robust solution.

By focusing on the dynamic rebuild of cloud environments, basically a clone of the production environment, organizations can enhance their CR/DR capabilities, reduce operational risks, and enable continuous service delivery in the face of disruptions. The shift toward the rebuild model represents a forward-thinking approach to CR/DR recovery, aligning with the evolving demands of cloud computing and organizational resilience.

Learn more about how Commvault Cloud Rewind can help you rapidly rewind; recover critical data, cloud applications, and configurations to a clean state; and swiftly rebuild your cloud environments after cyber incidents.

Additional Reading:

1. https://www.commvault.com/blogs/build-cloud-app-resilience-with-commvault-cloud-rewind
2. https://www.commvault.com/blogs/simplifying-cloud-resilience-and-cloud-recovery 
3. https://www.commvault.com/blogs/a-blueprint-for-effective-cloud-recovery