The best disaster recovery plans are the simplest, not because there aren’t hundreds of moving pieces involved, but because almost every contingency has been accounted for and is accommodated according to plan.
The Cloud Assists with DR
The good news is that the utility of cloud services for DR purposes has improved greatly in recent years, has simplified the process of protecting your business, and has lowered the costs of doing so. Ten years ago, we didn’t have the choice of DR cloud services at any reasonable price. Today, the market has enabled small and medium-sized businesses to fully protect themselves from disasters affecting local, stored data.
The introduction of quick-access, cost-effective, high-capacity data storage means that cloud services can perform other useful tasks for your business.
Using Cloud Services for a Virtual Data Centre
Businesses can now use the cloud to host their entire computing infrastructure in a remotely located data centre. This is usually accomplished as a managed service, with a third party being responsible for the facility, IT infrastructure (e.g. networking, conditioned power, racking, storage, servers) and management of your data. The third party provides the guarantee that all data is recoverable whenever it is required.
This type of cloud service is usually undertaken by larger organizations, because data management on this scale comes at a price. It is usually metered for the amount of specific resources used, and therefore needs to be scalable and elastic to hold varying amounts of data as is needed.
Using the Cloud for Application Services
Cloud applications can be delivered with some characteristics of a desktop app, and some characteristics of a pure web app. Like desktop apps, more advanced cloud applications can be quick and responsive and can work “offline” without reliable network connections. Like pure web applications, cloud apps don’t have to have master copies of everything reside permanently on your local device, they can be protected more easily and safely managed and updated online.
Therefore, it is possible to use cloud apps without having them eat up all the storage space on your hard drive or in your data centre. Cloud apps can be used by anyone with internet access, a web browser and a modem or other network connecting device, but for some there is actually a user interface residing on the local device. So the user can store, edit and cache data locally allowing full offline mode when needed. This is why hybrid cloud apps can partially function even when no Internet connection is available for extended periods.
Some useful hybrid cloud apps include document editing (Office 365, Google Apps), customer relationship management (Salesforce.com), and even running your entire desktop remotely, or virtually on other devices (a.k.a. Desktop-as-a-service or “DaaS”).
Cloud services are rewriting the rules for business-scale computing. As costs continue to fall (and core computing components become more commoditized), the cloud will increase in importance for the day-to-day operations of every organization.
