Disaster Recovery Using the Cloud Could Accelerate Industry Adaptation
For many small to medium sized enterprises, moving their systems into the cloud is often an intimidating task. These smaller sized companies typically have limited technology resources at their disposal. This creates both a barrier of entry problem for the cloud but it could also create an opportunity to introduce the cloud as a service that will back up data at the administrator’s discretion thus saving infrastructure costs. Building out infrastructure and using tapes to do nightly backups is still a common method of backing up data. In some industries, it could still be a requirement by law to back your data up this way.
If you are able to use the cloud as a back up option, it is time to start considering your options because the advantages far exceed the disadvantages from nearly every standpoint. Most seasoned IT professionals realize that saving the company money secures their own bottom line. From a pure cost perspective, building out a hot or cold spare infrastructure just to fail over is wasteful. When you use the cloud, you are able to do real time back ups of all of your clients data for a fraction of the cost without the headache of having to administer entire build outs just in case an event occurs.
For example, if you have all your users documents redirected to your servers and your servers are continuously syncing with your data recovery cloud, you could have a total catastrophe on site and every file would still exist in the cloud as if nothing ever happened. Many businesses who have adopted this approach will test their cloud’s fail over capabilities by taking down their offices network intentionally while having their users connect to the cloud in a disaster recovery scenario. Once this type of backup becomes more commonplace, it is expected that cloud infrastructures as a whole will gain more trust and become more widely accepted in small to medium enterprises.
