It wasn’t that long ago when an organization, once hit with an IT catastrophe like a flood or prolonged power outage, had to retrieve from a warehouse hundreds of magnetic tape canisters that constituted their backup.
From there it was a painstaking, labor-intensive and time-consuming process getting the IT systems restored and running. In retrospect, the backup tape now seems as primitive a technology as the LP record. As the digital MP3 file replaced vinyl, so did the Cloud replace the backup tape cabinet.
Cloud computing began to emerge with the rise of high-capacity online networks and the falling price of processing and storage systems over the past fifteen years. The Cloud’s promise of totally virtualized data processing and storage is still a promise in its infancy, and it holds untold value for everyone, from the smallest individual user to the largest corporations.
Strength in Simplicity
The Cloud’s strength comes from the promise of simplicity: a homogenized, standardized series of servers, housed in a remote, secure location, easily accessed through the web. For an individual user, it means you can access your own personal files and documents from any computer with web access. As an example, a user-friendly, network access Cloud storage site such as Dropbox, already has more than 200 million users and counting.
For the small and medium-sized organization, the Cloud provides a way to conduct business outside the office walls, and gives it the opportunity to achieve business continuity in the face of any number of catastrophic events that may afflict it at one time or another.
Continuity in the Face of Disaster
The Cloud is a particularly good fit for disaster recovery. It can provide an organization with a “safe” location – protected from the vagaries of flooding, ice storms and other environmental threats – to anchor their disaster recovery program. The Cloud gives you an alternate place to store your disaster recovery and business continuity plans, in addition to your critical business documents, databases and application files.
It can give people in your organization the ability to communicate with each other and with other stakeholders immediately in the face of disaster. A Cloud-based DR service gives your organization a site to re-establish your prime computing location, so long as your main site remains inoperable.
It may offer a recovery team of specialized experts to set-up, test and maintain your restored IT systems. And many of the features of Cloud-based services come without the front-end costs of setting up all that hardware and staffing on your own.
Always Questions About New Technology
When it comes to the Cloud, there will always be security fears associated with housing your organization’s crucial data somewhere else; somewhere in the ether. But there are always fears associated with new technologies. The Cloud represents a Brave New World of computing, and any organization planning disaster recovery in 2014 ought to seriously consider building their disaster recovery program around it.
