Leveraging The Cloud For Disaster Recovery - Data Management ...

Using public cloud resources can provide remote facilities, staffing and resources for disaster recovery planning if you don?t have your own. It can make an IT organization more agile and flexible as they can add or remove resources and staff as needed, and typically pay only for what they use ? helping maximize budgets.

The cloud offers businesses and non-profit organization a way to convert capital expenditures (CAPEX) to operational expenditures (OPEX) and helps IT better manage budgets overall, as all expenses are known in advance. But there are a variety of questions and concerns including:

??Is transferring large volumes of data and databases over the wire for offsite storage even feasible?
??How long will it take to recover that data in the case of a local system or storage crash?
??What about data security across the wire?
??What about the security of your data once it?s stored at the cloud provider?s facility?

The cloud can enable a good archiving and disaster recovery resource. It can even be a failover location for high availability of your critical applications and data for business continuity, as long as there is careful planning and the right tools are used. It may provide an IT organization with more agility and flexibility in deploying its business continuity/disaster recovery (DR) strategy and resources, while helping to reduce costs by reducing the need to purchase, deploy, manage and maintain the associated hardware and software.

The cloud may also be the perfect solution for companies that don?t have their own remote DR site or data center.? You can use it for offsite backup and long-term data storage, as a secure offsite host for continuous data protection (CDP) and even for failover servers to achieve a high-availability environment. These and other issues are being addressed on World Backup Day.

I outlined different ways you can leverage the cloud for data protection and disaster recovery in a whitepaper?.? What do you think are the most important considerations and caveats? Please share your thoughts.

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