Mission-critical means data or systems that your business couldn’t survive without. Today many businesses are susceptible to downtime and data loss when disasters hit.
When it comes to business backups, prioritizing is the first step towards implementing a truly effective strategy, followed by who is actually responsible to ensure the backup system is properly managed. Even today, not many companies have a disaster recovery plan in place and as for those who do have a plan cannot afford to have it underestimated.
Many businesses have felt the benefits of opting for cloud technology in various areas. Using the cloud has provided businesses with cost effective resource usage, rapid provisioning, easy scalability, flexibility etc.
Before the widespread adoption of cloud computing, data was backed up either by tapes or disks. There are clear drawbacks to this method; setting it up can be complex and it may be difficult to recover entire distributed, multi-tier, multi-site workloads. Furthermore, disks are not easily scalable, are not easily portable, and are not necessarily secure.
The cloud technology transformed the industry. By using virtualisation the entire server– including the operating system, applications, patches and data – is encapsulated into a virtual server. This entire virtual server can be copied or backed up to an offsite data centre and launched on a virtual host in a matter of minutes. It means the cloud can offer faster recovery times and multi-site availability at a fraction of the cost of conventional disaster recovery, at the same time eliminating cost on energy, as large onsite server rooms are removed.
Additionally, because virtual servers are hardware independent, data can be easily and quickly transferred between data centres without needing to reload each component of the server. This can further improve recovery times compared to traditional disaster recovery approaches in which servers need to be loaded with the correct operating system and application software before being patched to the last configuration used before any data can be restored.
Today, products like Storsimple and Evault help organisations integrate their data to the cloud providing primary storage, backup, archive and data recovery. Combined with Windows azure, the hybrid cloud solution optimizes total storage costs and data protection for enterprises.