Online backup or cloud recovery?
Posted by amcanty on October 5, 2009
by Ian Masters – Double-Take Software - Monday, 5 October 2009.
“Backing up files and data online has been around for quite a while, but it has never really taken off in a big way for business customers. There is also a new solution coming onto the market which uses “the cloud” for backup and recovery of company data. While these two approaches to disaster recovery appear to be similar, there are some significant differences as well. Which one would be right for you?
“Cloud recovery” can be a nebulous term, so I would define it based on the solution having the following features:
1. The ability to recover workloads in the cloud.
2. Effectively unlimited scalability with little or no up-front provisioning.
3. Pay-per-use billing model.
4. An infrastructure that is more secure and more reliable than the one you would build yourself.
5. Complete protection – i.e. non-expert users should be able to recover everything they need, by default.
If a solution does not meet up to these five criteria, then it should be called an online backup product. This may be right for your business, but typically they require more IT knowledge and are based on specific resources.
There is an old saying in the data protection business that the whole point of backing up is preparing to restore. Having a backup copy of your data is important, but it takes more than a pile of tapes (or an on-line account) to restore. You might need a replacement server, new storage, and maybe even a new data centre, depending on what went wrong.
Traditionally, you would either keep spare servers in a disaster recovery data centre, or suffer a period of downtime while you order and configure new equipment. With a cloud recovery solution, you don’t want just your data in the cloud, you want the ability to actually start up applications and use them, no matter what went wrong in your own environment.
The next area where cloud recovery can provide a better level of protection is around provisioning. Even using online backup systems, organizations would have to use replacement servers in the event of an outage. The whole point of recovering to the cloud is that they already have plenty of servers and additional capacity on tap. If you need more space to cope with a recovery incident, then you can add this to your account. Under this model, your costs are much lower than building the DR solution yourself, because you get the benefit of duplicating your environment without the upfront capital cost”
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