Disaster Recovery in the cloud: Faster, safer, without investments
The cloud offers an affordable and fast alternative to conventional Disaster Recovery approaches – without investing into new servers or further data center locations. As a result, there is now a solid strategy for small and medium-sized businesses to protect their business-critical data and infrastructure. Previously this kind of data protection was only affordable for large enterprises.
The benefits of the cloud are evident already in many contexts and confirm constantly in daily use by large companies around the world. But one aspect has been discussed little: The fact that due to cloud computing not only large enterprises can effectively and inexpensively prevent against the consequences of catastrophic IT failure using the cloud.
In large enterprises the disaster protection of servers and data consists mostly of redundant hardware at a second site. The explicit objective of these measures is to minimize the time until all IT operations are back to their normal operations. This requires large investments in hardware and personnel, which can be implemented cost-effectively only for larger enterprises.
The more favorable option stores backups only, often not even at a second site. When disaster strikes, the servers must be set up again with considerable manual effort, install operating systems and applications, plus patches from the production environment. Only then the services can be restored.
This is a costly and time-intensive operation. Especially because many companies solely use tape for their backups. Often times the regular backups are stored in the same location as the computer, so that in case of disaster (e.g. fire) there is no guaranteed access. Restoring backups to new servers can take days or even weeks when handling large amounts of data. And if the ERP system is also affected by the IT failure, the entire production stands still during this time period.
Cloud computing enables a completely new approach for Disaster Recovery to prevent such critical failures. Server, data and applications are replicated in the cloud and can run in a secure cloud data center within minutes.
For this approach, no new hardware is required, but it is rented. This not only reduces the costs involved but also increases safety.
But Cloud Disaster Recovery not only saves costs and time, but also offers other advantages: Companies can save their data and keep backups where they want – in a data center next door or on another continent. Even compliance requirements are easier to ensure in the cloud.
The ISO 27001 certification of Safe Swiss Cloud testifies that the cloud corresponds to the highest safety standards and processes. The ISO 27018 “compliance” ensures that the industry’s best practices are guaranteed for the processing of personal data such as customer or health data. The processes and infrastructure of Safe Swiss Cloud also correspond to the guidelines of the FINMA for outsourcing of IT operation and are ideal for banking and financial services.
Conclusion: Cloud Disaster Recovery is the best insurance to protect business critical IT resources in an emergency. It offers
- fast recovery with automatic failover
- high reliability through automated recovery plans
- low costs, because the costs of purchasing and maintenance of the infrastructure of a secondary or tertiary disaster recovery site are eliminated – and the Disaster Recovery service is part of the operating costs
Please Note:
You may use one of these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>