Can You Leverage Cloud Services For Disaster Recovery?

IT is great at some things, but out of its league in many cases. Business continuity planning is an example of the latter: No matter how well we set up our applications and systems, the human element is always a roadblock. Sure, we can build a complex system to return our CRM system to operation in Duluth, but will anyone be able to use it? Even the best disaster recovery (DR) infrastructure is useless without a business continuity (BC) strategy for everything else.

All IT can offer is to do its best to hold up its side of the deal. IT can design systems with return-to-operations in mind, replicating data and documenting configurations. IT can deploy remote systems and keep them warm and ready should we need them. And IT can create operational plans to rapidly get everything working when disaster strikes.

Although technology alone cannot solve the BC/DR conundrum, new technical solutions to help close the gap do occasionally appear. Data replication was one such key technology, as was server virtualization. Cloud computing will soon be added to the BC/DR hot list.

What do cloud computing and cloud storage services offer to help DR?

1. Cloud resources are inherently flexible, giving needed capacity on demand. This is especially important for compute resources, since BC operations often have unpredictable usage spikes as systems come online and resume operations.
2. Cloud resources scale based on usage, reducing the expense when there is no disaster. This is one of the main reasons companies don't invest in disaster recovery capacity: It's so expensive on a daily basis "just" to be prepared!
3. Cloud resources are available anywhere. Rather than trying to keep displaced employees in close proximity to technology, public cloud systems can be used from anywhere during a disaster.