Cloud Recovery

I had a conversation with a friend today who was speaking to a company that wanted to setup server replication to the Amazon EC2 infrastructure in order to save cost of building a disaster recovery data center. Creating a duplicate or disaster recovery data center can be cost prohibitive as you have to lease a location, provide power and cooling as well as new hardware and bandwidth and that doesn’t include the labor involved with setting all that up. When Amazon can store your data for as little as .35 cents per gigabyte you could store entire servers for just a few hundred dollars a month. This low cost pricing for companies is certainly attractive and could pose a problem for some hosting companies that charge several thousands dollars per month for the same service. For smaller SMB’s this makes perfect sense and some host based replication vendors are providing this option today. Companies that may only have a few servers or an SBS server this is really the best option for them to be able to replicate entire server workloads to the cloud, failover and run the workload from the cloud infrastructure and then recover once the issue has been resolved. However, this doesn’t have to be limited to SMB’s, I also see the need for larger enterprise organizations to use the cloud as a platform for backup and recovery for tier 2 or 3 servers.

The innovation and demand is certainly there and it isn’t just the typical consumer looking to backup their iPod. There are still some challenges that may slow the adoption of backing up to the cloud. Security will always be a concern but that is always the case when ever you are sending data over the internet. It won’t be long before companies begin to see the value and cost savings of being able backup, run and recovery workloads in a cloud infrastructure.

What are your thoughts on the adoption of backing up to the Cloud?