Cloud Hosting Article

About eight years ago my husband and I set up our disaster recovery plan for our home network. (Yeah, we’re geeky but smart like that.) At the time, we considered using a cloud-based disaster recovery solution, but the market was still not mature enough and we settled for cold storage off-site backups by hard drive.

How times have changed. Today, businesses and geeky home network administrators have several options for proper disaster recovery. And all the good ones go through the cloud.

That’s because the two key elements of disaster recovery are off-site backup and automation. Both of these are areas where the cloud excels.

“It is important for organizations to have a strategic approach to business continuity and resiliency,” said Lingraju Sawkar, director of integrated technology services for IBM (News - Alert) in India and South Asia, in a recent article. “In the event of a disaster, a physical recovery approach may drastically increase the risk of data loss while significantly increasing recovery time as well.”

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) currently is dominated by the likes of IBM, HP and SunGard Availability Services, but many players are currently jockeying for space. The market could be worth as much as $5.7 billion by 2018, according to research by Gartner (News - Alert). The overall cloud storage market is expected to be worth $46.8 billion by 2018, according to a MarketsandMarkets report, with compound annual growth rate of an astounding 40.2 percent.

“The need for uninterrupted business operations has become crucial for us to ensure enhanced customer engagement and protect critical business data”, said Chander Khanduja, CIO at Luminous in New Delhi, a backup power company. “The subscription-based pricing model provides costs benefits as well.”

One issue that the industry will have to face is bandwidth issues, however.

A key performance metric will be the rate at which a business can transfer virtual machine images from the enterprise premises to the cloud. Many vendors are building in WAN optimization solutions as part of the overall solution as a result. It is one thing to offload data, but another to get it back fast after a disaster.

That in mind, Datapipe (News - Alert) offers three levels of disaster recovery. The enterprise cloud provider that promises 100 percent uptime guarantee has hot site, warm site and cold site disaster recovery options depending on the needs of the client business. With a hot site solution, for instance, there is an immediate recovery of all infrastructure, data and applications through a fully-redundant data configuration that mirrors the enterprise’s production systems.

Dedicated data center space and infrastructure are included to ensure mission-critical applications are available in the event of a disaster with the hot site option, but there also is warm site backup that can get back online in a few hours—or cold site backup that is more in line with disaster recovery schemes that predate DRaaS.

While the cloud benefits all areas of business, there is hardly an area that benefits more than disaster recovery. The cloud is ideal for DRaaS, and the market has finally matured to the point where it is a viable and preferable option.