Cloud Disaster Recovery (Cloud DR) is a solution that provides the ability to protect on-premises virtual machines running on VMware environment to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure using existing on-premises data protection technologies (including protecting to AWS GovCloud and Azure Government).

Cloud Disaster Recovery works as a standalone solution that connects to Avamar and PowerProtect DD, it is part of PowerProtect DP stack, and it is also part of PowerProtect Data Manager and RecoverPoint for VMs.

The solution provides disaster recovery orchestration that converts backups files of protected virtual machines into VMs that can run natively on the cloud and allows direct recovery of backup files to any VMware environment.

The solution also provides Failback orchestration that copies failed over VMs from AWS or Azure back to an on-premises VMware environment.

Cloud Disaster Recovery allows reducing investment costs by replicating to the cloud, rather than to another physical site. In addition, the solution replicates data to AWS S3 or Azure storage accounts, which are a cost-effective object storage, and AWS or Azure VMs are launched on-demand only when a recovery is initiated by the user.

This white paper will focus on the main functionality of Cloud Disaster Recovery and will provide best practice recommendations and settings in order to gain the most from Cloud DR.