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Cloud-based Disaster Recovery: The Way Forward

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Gartner predicts the DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) market could be worth $5.7 billion by 2018. Gartner also states that by 2014, over 30% of midsize companies will have adopted DR in the cloud or recovery-as-a-service. This begs the question:

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Implementing a Disaster Recovery solution is never simple. But the emergence of cloud-based DR services can make it much easier, affordable and reliable. Whether your business can take advantage of these benefits will rest on taking a hard look at your distinctive DR needs and matching them to a service that fits. The cloud greatly extends disaster recovery options, yields significant cost savings, and enables DR methods to organisations across the board that may previously have only been possible in larger organizations. It does not, however, change the DR fundamentals of having to devise a solid disaster recovery plan, testing it periodically, and having users trained and prepared appropriately.

Service providers too face several challenges when providing a high-value service like DR:

- Manual operations and expertise-dependent processes make offering DR an expensive and non-scalable proposition.

- Since applications are typically made up of heterogeneous solutions, it becomes difficult to offer monitoring and recovery as a uniform service.

- Recovery SLAs are hard to monitor and report on.

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This is where Cloud-based DRM solutions can make a difference. Some key differentiators brought in by a cloud-based recovery solution are -

Cost Effective

A Cloud DRM solution is designed to enable service providers to offer DR as a scalable and cost-effective service. It supports pre-packaged DR solution templates for various technologies, thereby enabling service providers to deploy a best-practices DR solution quickly and easily. The need for expertise is reduced and deployments can be automated, resulting in a scalable and cost effective DR service-offering for the end customer.

Automated DR

Automation is the key to IT agility and operational efficiency. A Cloud DRM automates the DR process, enabling reliable and scalable operations across multiple customers. DR processes that are typically automated are failover recovery and DR drill processes.

Simplified DR

The Cloud DRM solution simplifies disaster recovery for the service provider by offering a single console to monitor and manage all DR activities. All DR-related events, alerts, and process management across several customers can be managed from a single console that offers multiple views.

Integration with Service Provider Ecosystem

DRM solutions need to be able to offer multi-tenancy capabilities that enable service providers to offer service securely to all their customers. Such solutions can be seamlessly be integrated with external monitoring, alerting, and trouble ticketing solutions to ensure easy and smooth integration with the service provider management eco-system.

Finally, DR is about shifting the tentative to the assured. We cannot be certain when a disaster event may occur, but we should-and must-be certain of the systems and processes we set in place to recover when they do. To determine whether your business is ready to bring DR to the cloud, you need to consider factors pertaining both to your own organization and to your service provider. The practicality of implementing recovery-as-a-service in your organization hinges on both business and technology criteria. ROI, cost savings, recovery objectives, application criticality, organisation's IT implementation roadmap etc. to name a few from the business and service level agreements, compliance, security and underlying technology used etc. from the service provider comprise this.

Cloud computing is driving organizations to completely re-evaluate their IT investments and strategies. As the technology of cloud evolves and spreads its wings, concepts like DRaaS are causing resurgence in business continuity and disaster recovery planning. While the stage is certainly set for explosive growth in DRaaS, the industry has tokeep innovating to provide more choices and customization for organizations looking to use the cloud to improve uptime and IT service levels. One thing is clear for sure. The time is right for both industry and end users to focus and explore all possibilities that the cloud can offer and take advantage of the same.

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