Disaster Recovery: Helping customers to move beyond cloud’s great white hype

Grazed from ChannelPro. Author: David Blackman.

When cloud computing first made its appearance some years ago it was heralded as the start of a revolution within the IT industry. IT companies and resellers, eager to climb aboard the bandwagon, rushed to bring new ‘cloud-based’ services to market, and the concept quickly gaining a momentum all of its own. Gartner[1] went so far as to predict that 20 percent of businesses would own no IT assets at all by 2012.

The analyst house wasn’t alone in its views; when questioned for the Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index at the end of 2010, businesses estimated they would have 30 percent of their infrastructure in the cloud in the next twelve months, an increase of 87 percent. However, the reality of the situation was that those companies only grew their cloud-based infrastructure by 19 percent…

Organisations – particularly the more midsized mainstream companies to whom the cloud was specifically marketed – were left confused by constantly changing definitions of the cloud. They harboured serious concerns about the recovery of their critical data in the event of a disaster, security risks as well as a lack of trust in cloud providers.

So what’s the opportunity for resellers today in terms of customers looking to implement cloud services for their customers? According to the recent Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index 2012, the vast majority of organisations (83 percent) now have some form of cloud-based IT, an increase of 13 percent from 2010. However, in reality the cloud still only represents 19 percent their entire infrastructure…

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