The Cost Benefits of Cloud Based DR vs Traditional DR

– Raghuram Gorur, Program Director, Happiest Minds Technologies

Regardless of an industry, unforeseen events can result in stalling day to day operations impacting a business drastically. In those crucial times, organizations need to recover as quickly as possible and continue to offer its services. The importance of disaster recovery thus needs to be reiterated time and again.

In today’s fast paced digital landscape, majority of an organization’s data is stored electronically and loss of data can impact a business gravely. Not having a well thought out disaster recovery plan in place puts any organization at financial risk, can result in reputation loss and can also impact its clients.

Raghuram-Gorur

Program Director ,Happiest Minds Technologies

How Cloud Based DR Works

Leveraging Cloud for disaster recovery involves maintaining copies of enterprise data in a secure cloud storage environment. Based on virtualization, cloud computing takes a completely different approach towards disaster recovery and organizations have started realizing that potential. It is a smarter alternative for companies that may be strapped for IT resources.

Today public cloud storage provides object, block or file storage services through a REST API using Internet Protocol (IP). Service pricing is based on capacity, data transfer and/or services. It provides on-demand storage capacity elasticity and self-provisioning.

Is Cloud DR for you?

Initially SMBs were early adopters of cloud based disaster recovery services. The reason was because these organizations often lacked the recovery data center, experienced IT staff and specialized skill sets needed to manage a disaster recovery (DR) program on their own. This made managed recovery in the cloud an extremely attractive option. However, recently enterprises have also begun initial piloting or have moved beyond the piloting stage. Recently, Gartner has reported growing number of production instances, rapidly falling service pricing and significant increases in service pilot evaluations being conducted in organizations of all sizes.

Evaluating the Cost

Having disaster recovery sites in cloud reduces the need for data center space, IT infrastructure and IT resources, leading to major cost reductions. This enables organizations of all sizes to set up disaster recovery options which were earlier found only in large enterprises.

Weighing the Benefits

Cloud services for enterprises are still rapidly evolving, and they must weigh the cost benefits against the service management risks as an integral part of the decision - making. The benefits will vary, depending on the diversity of computing platforms that require recovery support, automation required, recurring recovery testing tasks that need to be performed etc. Also how best the customer efficiently use the same-provider for cloud storage, ongoing data backup, replication and archival. However the key challenge of security and reliability remains which needs to be thoroughly evaluated.

The cloud’s pay-as-you-go model benefits users who can turn resources on and off as needed, which is similar to the case of disaster recovery services that attain resources on demand only after a failure occurs. It can reduce cost, risk and complexity by having one solution with complete protection and recovery capabilities for both physical and virtual servers. An organization can select only the machines they want to replicate during disaster and reduce the extra costs associated with replicating everything.

Having a clear and concise disaster recovery plan can actually give an organization a competitive edge. With newer options based on old fundamentals, cloud based disaster recovery, though in its nascent stage, has an interesting role to play in small, medium and large enterprise in the future.