Azure Cosmos DB Service restoration with least RPO & RTO

In an unforeseen event of a failure of the company’s IT infrastructure or a particular part of it, the customers expect the company to restore the damaged infrastructure with minimal RTO and RPO, this ensures business continuity with minimal business impact. However, in the Azure Cosmo DB environment, the RTO and RPO are dependent on Azure support, which is provided by Microsoft. At times, this dependency delays the restoration of the infrastructure, thereby extending the RTO and RPO leading to a significant impact on the business finances. 

The usual steps adopted during the DR restoration are: 

1. Create/Raise an incident with Microsoft on the Azure Portal.

2. The Microsoft Support shall assign the ticket to a Cloud engineer.

3. Using the export/import tool, restore the DB to the original node.

4. Verify the database and the cloud engineer shall restore the DB on the target node.

5. Integrity and mitigation.

Obviously, the dependency on Azure support to restore a production environment has significant impact on the business continuity.  

Solution 

A quick and easy solution for this scenario is to use the Azure Data Factory Pipeline, which removes the dependency on the Azure support team and allows the backup and restoration to be executed directly by the cloud team.

In this approach, the Azure Data Factory Pipeline allows the Cosmos DB to be backed up as a blob storage in another or the same cloud environment. The cloud architect shall create and configure the dataset for backup and restoration to the Azure Blob container. Based on the frequency of the backup schedule, the data from the Cosmos DB will get backed up to the blob storage. During an unexpected disaster, the cloud team shall restore the data to the target node from the Azure Blob Container. While Azure Data factory solution works seamlessly on the cloud infrastructure, it faces limitations when used on-premise storage. During an unforeseen disaster, if the on-premise environment is not accessing the data restoration, then the restoration becomes a challenge.

Business Benefits

Some of the benefits achieved by this solution are : 

1. It Improves the RTO and RPO significantly compared to that achieved by Azure support based

2. Reduced dependence on the Azure support during DR and business continuity.  

3. Reduction in expenses related to the restoration of the Cosmos DB instance.

4. Data factory Pipeline option reduces the overall cost of the solution as the pricing is based on “pay-as-you-go”.

By carefully identifying your company’s requirements and laying out a plan, you’ll be able to determine what types of services you’ll need to use to meet the recovery objectives. Azure Data Factory solutions provides several services and features to help your organization meet these objectives. If you’re looking for more information on how 1CloudHub can help with your organizations technology  please contact us here.