Disaster Recovery: Public Cloud vs. Private Cloud

Akins IT • June 20, 2021
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As stated in the previous parts of this blog series, malicious actors on the internet are currently taking advantage of the financial and wellness insecurity that came with COVID-19. We are seeing more ransomware, malware, and data exfiltration attacks during COVID than ever before and unprotected victims of ransomware have 2 options.

  • Option 1: Pay the ransom and hope the malicious actor unlocks your resources.
  • or Option 2: Throw all affected equipment away, and rebuild your environment from the ground up.

With downtime costing $500,000 per hour on average, disaster recovery is a no-brainer investment for protecting your workloads and data from Ransomware or other service interruptions. 


HOW CAN DISASTER RECOVERY HELP YOU?

Disaster or site recovery can be used to keep your workloads running after a disaster event causes your infrastructure to be unavailable. DR boasts significantly faster RPOs and RTOs than backup restorations. RPOs are recovery point objectives, your most recent restore point, and RTOs are recovery time objectives, which is the amount of time needed to be up and running after service disruption. Most disaster recovery technologies work by maintaining an offline replica of your protected workloads at a separate site. 

With private cloud disaster recovery, that replica, or fail-over site, is a data center separate from your main site. Private cloud disaster recovery has a higher CapEx, but much lower OpEx, than public cloud disaster recovery, as you will have to purchase the equipment capable of running your protected workloads. Private cloud disaster recovery is also vulnerable to equipment failure, power loss, natural disaster, and any other threats that come with maintaining your own data centers.


Public cloud disaster recovery maintains the fail-over sites in a cloud provider's workload, such as Azure, AWS, or iLand. Public cloud disaster recovery only has the cost of licensing in CapEx, but the OpEx can get costly depending on the size and utilization of your protected resources. However, public cloud disaster recovery can be configured to be geo-redundant, meaning your workloads can keep running even if your entire data center goes down for good. Since it's running off your network, public cloud disaster recovery is the best defense against ransomware. The most secure and available business continuity plans typically configure disaster recovery for multi-site, where their workloads are replicated to multiple private and public cloud fail-over sites.

CONTACT AKINS IT


If you'd like to begin building a business continuity plan, or review one that hasn't been updated recently, reach out to Akins IT to learn more about our Managed Disaster Recovery as a Service solution bundles.

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October 20, 2025 — Early today, Amazon Web Services experienced a major incident centered in its US‑EAST‑1 (N. Virginia) region. AWS reports the event began around 12:11 a.m. PT and tied back to DNS resolution affecting DynamoDB , with mitigation within a couple of hours and recovery continuing thereafter. As the outage rippled, popular services like Snapchat, Venmo, Ring, Roblox, Fortnite , and even some Amazon properties saw disruptions before recovering. If your apps or data are anchored to a single cloud, a morning like this can turn into a help‑desk fire drill. A multi‑cloud or cloud‑smart approach helps you ride through these moments with minimal end‑user impact. What happened (and why it matters) Single‑region fragility: US‑EAST‑1 is massive—and when it sneezes, the internet catches a cold. Incidents here have a history of wide blast radius. Shared dependencies: DNS issues to core services (like DynamoDB endpoints) can cascade across workloads that never directly “touch” that service. Multi‑cloud: practical resilience, not buzzwords For mid‑sized orgs, schools, and local government, multi‑cloud doesn’t have to mean “every app in every cloud.” It means thoughtful redundancy where it counts : Multi‑region or multi‑provider failover for critical apps Run active/standby across AWS and Azure (or another provider), or at least across two AWS regions with automated failover. Start with citizen‑facing portals, SIS/LMS access, emergency comms, and payment gateways. Portable platforms Use Kubernetes and containers, keep state externalized, and standardize infra with Terraform/Ansible so you can redeploy fast when a region (or a provider) wobbles. (Today’s DNS hiccup is exactly the kind of scenario this protects against.) Resilient data layers Replicate data asynchronously across clouds/regions; choose databases with cross‑region failover and test RPO/RTO quarterly. If you rely on a managed database tied to one region, design an escape hatch. Traffic and identity that float Use global traffic managers/DNS to shift users automatically; keep identity (MFA/SSO) highly available and not hard‑wired to a single provider’s control plane. Run the playbook Document health checks, automated cutover, and comms templates. Then practice —tabletops and live failovers. Many services today recovered within hours, but only teams with rehearsed playbooks avoided user‑visible downtime. The bottom line Cloud concentration risk is real. Outages will happen—what matters is whether your constituents, students, and staff feel it. A pragmatic multi‑cloud stance limits the blast radius and keeps your mission‑critical services online when one provider has a bad day. Need a resilience check? Akins IT can help you prioritize which systems should be multi‑cloud, design the right level of redundancy, and validate your failover plan—without overspending. Let’s start with a quick, 30‑minute review of your most critical services and RPO/RTO targets. (No slideware, just actionable next steps.)
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