Should you trust disaster recovery to the cloud?
October 26, 2012
Grazed from FCW. Author: Alan Joch.
Implementing a disaster recovery plan can be like eating vegetables, getting enough fiber and sleeping at least eight hours a night. Most people understand why these things are important, but few do them religiously. The problem is that traditional disaster recovery methods call for re-creating the full IT environment at a separate off-site facility to keep agencies safe from unplanned IT outages. The investment in redundant resources pays off if a server gets fried, some stealthy malware takes down a storage system, or a hurricane forces a data center evacuation.
But on most days, when disasters don’t strike, all that duplicate hardware and software are running in standby mode and not contributing meaningfully to the agency’s daily operations. That is a tough expense to justify, particularly in times of tight IT budgets…
And so a growing number of IT managers are considering a way to change the equation: cloud-based disaster recovery, also known as DR-as-a-service (DRaaS). With this option, agencies subscribe to a third-party cloud service to avoid the upfront costs of buying, installing and managing the necessary hardware and software. Instead, they pay a monthly fee for storing duplicate copies of data and applications at an off-site location…
Read more from the source @ http://fcw.com/articles/2012/10/26/disaster-recovery-cloud.aspx