Understanding business continuity and disaster recovery for VCF as a Service
Disaster recoveryThe ability of IT services to recover from rare but major incidents and non-transient, wide-scale failures, such as service disruption that affects an entire geographical area. The impact of such an incident exceeds the ability of the high availability design to handle it. See also high availability, recovery time objective, recovery point objective. involves a set of policies, tools, and procedures for returning a system, an application, or an entire data center to full operation after a catastrophic interruption. It includes procedures for copying and storing an installed system's essential data in a secure location, and for recovering that data to restore normalcy of operation.
Responsibilities
For more information about responsibility ownership for using IBM Cloud® products between IBM® and the customer, see Shared responsibilities for IBM Cloud products.
For more information about your responsibilities when using IBM Cloud for VMware Cloud Foundation as a Service, see Understanding your responsibilities when using VCF as a Service.
Disaster recovery strategy
IBM Cloud has business continuityThe capability of a business to withstand outages and to operate mission-critical services normally and without interruption in accordance with predefined service-level agreements. plans in place to provide for the recovery of services within hours if a disaster occurs. You are responsible for your data backup and associated recovery of your content.
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) as a Service provides mechanisms to protect your data and restore service functions. Business continuity plans are in place to achieve targeted recovery point objectiveIn disaster recovery planning, the point at which data is restored to in the event of a disaster. (RPO) and recovery time objectiveThe maximum duration of time within which an application should be restored after any type of disaster. (RTO) for the service. The following table outlines the targets for VCF as a Service.
| Disaster recovery objective | Target value | Method |
|---|---|---|
| RPO | 24 h | Use a backup provider such as Veeam® Backup and Recovery to store periodic backups of your workload. |
| RPO | Minutes | Use a replication provider such as Veeam to replicate your workload to another location. |
| RTO | Minutes to hours | The recovery time objective depends on the storage medium that is used for your backups and on how long it takes for your workload to be ready from a cold start. |
Locations
For more information about service availability within regions and data centers, see Service and infrastructure availability by location.