Virtualizing disaster recovery using cloud computing
Transition your applications quickly to a resilient cloud – Not long after the widespread adoption of computers, it became apparent that disaster recovery would become a necessary com-ponent of organizations’ IT plans. Business data must be backed up, and key processes like billing, payroll and procurement need to continue even if an organization’s data center is disabled due to a disaster. Over time, two distinct approaches to disaster recovery models emerged: dedicated and shared models. While effective, these approaches often forced organizations to choose between cost and speed.
Fast forward 50 years to today’s “always-on” world. The flow of information and commerce in our global business environment never sleeps. With the demands of an around-the-clock world, organizations need to start thinking in terms of application continuity rather than infrequent disasters, and disaster recovery service providers need to enable more seamless, nearly instanta-neous failover and failback of critical business applications. Yet given the reality that most IT budgets are flat or even reduced, these services must be provided without incurring significant upfront or ongoing expenditures.
Cloud-based business resilience can provide an attractive alter-native to traditional disaster recovery, offering both the more-rapid recovery time associated with a dedicated infrastructure and the reduced costs that are consistent with a shared recovery model. With pay-as-you-go pricing and the ability to scale up as conditions change, cloud computing can help organizations meet the expectations of today’s frenetic, fast paced environment where IT demands continue to increase but budgets do not.
This white paper discusses traditional approaches to disaster recovery and describes how organizations can use cloud computing to help plan for both the mundane interruptions to service—cut power lines, server hardware failures and security breaches—as well as more-infrequent disasters. The paper provides key considerations when planning for the transition to cloud-based business resilience and in selecting your cloud partner.
