With cyber attacks frequently making headlines, leading organizations are looking closely at how they securely store data.
At one end of the scale, unplanned downtime can lead to a drop in productivity and a heavy cost, while at the other end there’s the potential for data loss or theft, opening up the business to legal and financial ramifications as well as reputational damage.
There is also the pressure to be “always on” from an IT standpoint but business interruptions can and do occur and even small disasters can lead to long outages.
For these reasons the rise of cloud-based backup has been prevalent in both small, medium, and enterprise sized business throughout the world.
Businesses today are utilizing the cloud to provide cost effective disaster recovery as a service solutions to help both reduce costs and decrease risk of data loss. In this scenario applications and data are copied to and stored on the provider’s cloud infrastructure. If a catastrophic failure occurs, the backup can simply be activated and pressed into action within minutes.
Whatever the size of a business, it is important to research all options before implementing a cloud solution. Not all cloud-based DR solutions are the same or work the same way. In many circumstances, the best disaster recovery solution is a hybrid of cloud and on-site technologies.
On the plus side, cloud-based data protection and backup offers reduced cost and improved agility. There is a time-saving feature as IT staff, instead of taking care of backup infrastructure are free to focus on other aspects of the business. It also enables organizations to recover their data quickly, negating the need to wait for on-premise servers to be recovered.
Another advantage over older, hardware-based forms of DR is cost. With cloud there is no need to set up fail over systems and network infrastructure at secondary site, or have the added cost of maintaining those systems. Instead the DR partner manages the infrastructure-with the added benefit that businesses only pay for the storage capacity they need at the time, when they need to use it.
By careful evaluation and subsequent planning more and more enterprises, both large and small are finding cloud-based DR solutions to be a safe and cost-effective method to protect their company’s valuable data.
