BACK TO BASICS: WHAT IS CLOUD-BASED DISASTER RECOVERY?

Coming back to the basics to refresh can help you both understand what cloud-based recovery is and help you to explain it to someone who is unfamiliar.

Disaster recovery, through the cloud or otherwise, is an end-to-end, comprehensive process for minimizing interruptions caused by system failure due to any cause, from natural disasters to malicious attacks.

Recovery is accomplished by setting up, in advance, a redundant system intended to speed recovery of business-critical data and applications. In cloud-based disaster recovery, the redundant site is a virtual site, using standard cloud technology such as cluster computing, to build a virtual machine that holds the recovery bundle.

Restoration can occur in minutes, as opposed to the hours that can lapse when depending on an in-house data center to reload server and application software onto physical machines – a problem is exacerbated when that data center has been affected by the same events that caused the system to fail, to begin with.

Following are the principle factors that typically lead companies to choose a cloud-based solution for their data recovery plan (as reported by the analyst firm, Enterprise Strategy Group).

1. Remote data storage for a secure data recovery source location
2. More cost-effective than in-house solutions
3. Staying state-of-the-art by leveraging the CSP’s expertise
4. Commitment of CSPs to provide expert support
5. As-a-service model allows elimination of dedicated backup hardware
6. Better security than in-house security
7. Reduced costs for better infrastructure than can be maintained in-house
8. Reduced costs for IT personnel, particularly security specialists

Source: http://www.smartdatacollective.com/gunjantripathi/438609/debunking-top-ten-myths-cloud-based-disaster-recovery