Cloud enterprise solutions have become commonplace, but has system disaster recovery evolved accordingly? While many companies have shifted over to a primarily cloud-based platform, many of them have not modified their system disaster recovery plans to utilize this new technology. Cloud platforms have become popular as scalable, accessible, high-performance solutions — all attributes that would be extremely helpful for a system disaster recovery solution.

Article Index:

• Disaster recovery on the cloud through virtualization
• Contemporary disaster recovery methods
• Benefits of cloud disaster recovery over contemporary methods
• The future of disaster recovery in the cloud  

Disaster recovery on the cloud through virtualization

Companies have been steadily working on methods to move the majority of their infrastructure to the cloud and to leverage virtual machines. The use of virtualization technology makes deploying a cloud disaster recovery system much easier. Companies could easily restore their entire system with the click of a button, and their disaster recovery solution could be scaled up easily to their needs. Even better, these solutions can be rendered into cost-effective solutions for small businesses.

Disaster recovery through virtualization offers a push-button service that takes time out of disaster recovery. It makes it much easier for a company to rebound from any potential issues that may occur without any significant downtime. Many companies have already moved to virtualization, and disaster recovery on the cloud is likely soon to follow for many of these businesses.

Disaster recovery is only one part of a comprehensive disaster plan. Companies will still need to iron out the details, including how to deal with clients after the disaster and how employees will connect to the system in the event that the localized systems are down. However, disaster recovery through the cloud makes it easier for companies to focus less on the actual act of recovery and more on the other issues at hand.

Contemporary disaster recovery methods

Disaster recovery today has a tendency to be quite complex. Often, full backups are kept at a secondary site containing the IT infrastructure. Data and infrastructure must be rebuilt during a disaster, and this can often take a significant amount of time. This form of data recovery has a tendency to be costly because the company needs to essentially reproduce their IT infrastructure and data in another location — sometimes multiple locations if redundancy is desired.

If data and infrastructure is not properly stored, it can take days to recover the entire system. During this time, the company will be losing money. Furthermore, the longer the recovery takes, the more that can go wrong throughout the recovery process.

Many current data-recovery methods are not properly utilizing virtualization. Though virtualization has been a superior solution for a long time, many companies have been held back through legacy equipment and an inability to upgrade. Presently, companies are now able to move forward with comprehensive virtualization due to upgraded technology and an increased desire to reduce costs.

Disaster recovery through the cloud is a natural extension of the cloud platform. Companies are able to quickly deploy a cloud disaster recovery service, which can completely replicate within 30 minutes, unlike many of the contemporary disaster recovery methods.

Benefits of cloud disaster recovery over contemporary methods

Cloud disaster recovery is scalable, cost-effective, and fast. When compared to contemporary methods, a cloud disaster recovery solution is easier to set up and deploy and much faster to utilize in the event of an actual disaster. A company’s infrastructure can be running within a matter of minutes rather than a matter of days, thereby saving the company a large amount of lost revenue.

Cloud disaster recovery solutions can easily be seen as the way of the future; they are a natural extension of existing technology and the way that technology is clearly progressing. Further, with so many enterprise solutions now moving directly to the cloud, it only becomes natural to move disaster recovery solutions to the cloud as well.

Unlike contemporary methods, cloud disaster recovery solutions don’t need extensive physical and virtual resources. With cloud solutions, data is stored in high performance, scalable systems. Companies only pay for the resources they need and are thus able to cut their costs. The amount of resources a company uses can go up with its needs without having to physically upgrade the system, making disaster recovery perfect for companies that will need to scale up quickly.

The only issue holding cloud disaster recovery back in the past has been a lack of virtualization. Now that virtualization has been adopted by many companies, virtualization services are able to easily replicate and restore data and infrastructure. Some services can even replicate and restore a system with a few button clicks. Many companies are already moving forward with cloud disaster recovery solutions.

The future of disaster recovery in the cloud

A move toward the cloud for disaster recovery solutions is inevitable for most businesses. The majority of services are being deployed on the cloud today due to the major benefits offered by the platform. The question is not whether disaster recovery will move to the cloud but instead whether now is the right time for disaster recovery to move to the cloud.

The adapting of virtualization as a standard by many companies paves the way for easy disaster recovery through cloud platforms. There are many benefits to using cloud disaster recovery solutions, and there no longer appears to be anything holding companies back on a technical level.

Cloud enterprise solutions have become commonplace, but has system disaster recovery evolved accordingly? While many companies have shifted over to a primarily cloud-based platform, many of them have not modified their system disaster recovery plans to utilize this new technology. Cloud platforms have become popular as scalable, accessible, high-performance solutions — all attributes that would be extremely helpful for a system disaster recovery solution.