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. Now new solutions are coming to market that use "the
cloud" for the backup and recovery of company data, but how do
these differ to online backup and what can they offer?writes Ian Masters, UK sales and marketing director
at
Double-Take Software.
"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 - ie, non-expert users should be able to
recover everything they need, by default.
If a solution does not meet these five criteria, then it should
be called an online backup product.
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 online account) to restore. You might need a
replacement server, new storage, and maybe even a new data centre,
depending on what went wrong.
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. So
an area where cloud recovery can provide a better level of
protection is around provisioning. The whole point of recovering to
the cloud is that the service providers already have plenty of
servers and additional capacity on tap.
The ideal cloud recovery solution partner won't charge you for
those servers up front, but is sure to have as much capacity as you
need, when you need it. Under this model, your costs are much lower
than building it yourself, because you get the benefit of
duplicating your environment without the cost.
Removing the up-front price and long-term commitment shifts the
risk away from the customer, and onto the vendor. The vendor just
has to keep the quality up to keep customers loyal, which requires
great service and efficient handling of customer accounts. The
cloud recovery provider takes on all the management effort and
constant improvement of infrastructure that is required.
Another area where cloud recovery can deliver better results is
through usability and protecting everything that a business needs.
While some businesses know exactly what files should be protected,
most either don't have this degree of control, or have got users
into the habit of following standard formats or saving documents
into specific places.
Business users want to click "start" and know that at any time
they can click "recover", and there won't be any "please insert
your original disk" issues. Complete protection means that the
business can be protected without requiring an expert in your
systems and every application to be at hand when recovery is
needed.
Cloud means different things to different people. If you are
going to depend on it to protect your data, it had better mean
something specific. The five points I've mentioned may not cover
every possible protection goal, but they set a good minimum
standard.