Recovering in the cloud | Business Continuity Connect Zone

Recovering in the cloud

Posted by: Admin | Date: July 23rd, 2012

There can be few better applications for cloud services than business continuity. It banishes many of the barriers to putting together a sold continuity plan, brings down the cost of putting the plan into action and takes the amount of resiliency that can be offered to a new level.

Yet in our survey, only 55% have a cloud-based solution in place or are considering one. Only 13% say they would not consider it though; so that leaves nearly a third (32%) of our sample unsure about the cloud.

Cloud services have been through various incarnations, beginning with the development of software-as-a-service in applications such as customer relationship management, then infrastructure-as-a-service, aggregating the foundation technology layer for multiple clients. Finally, it moved to the middleware layer, providing platform-as-a-service, IT services that can be used by individual clients to build their specific requirements.

The development of cloud continuity, or recovery-as-a-service, falls into this latter category as a relatively new development. So that might account for the uncertainty about it. But its impact on continuity objectives can be dramatic.

For example, using cloud recovery services, the recovery time objective ? the amount of time it takes to have systems back up and running ? comes down to one to fours. The recovery point objective ? the amount of data loss that is incurred ? comes down to 0 to 15 minutes worth of data.

These are the sort of levels that organisations are looking for according to our survey, but it also shows they are also not achieving them today.

Cloud recovery can also get clients up and running in a relatively short amount of time ? really a matter of hours after the service has been requested. Because the cloud capacity is essentially available on demand, services do not have to be provisioned specifically for each client.

It?s easier to test the service too, because the recovery services are virtually available all the time, rather than having to be sourced specifically. Again, that fits in with organisations? desire to test their plans every six months or annually.

Finally, the cloud brings the cost of continuity down dramatically because it?s based on shared infrastructure, the economies of scale of pooled resources made available to all. That makes the kind of objectives that organisations have long been seeking achievable.

Source: http://www.hp-businesscontinuityzone.com/recovering-in-the-cloud/

baa dodgers triple play samoyed kenny powers kenny powers carl hagelin triple play