Unless you have had your head buried in the sand lately, you have by now heard of the term cloud computing. Cloud computing can be defined as service-based computing, where a company buys software or storage as a service (SaaS) from an internal or external provider.
A good example of cloud computing in action is e-mail from either Yahoo or Google. Instead of running your own mail servers, you simply allow your employees to use the services provided by those companies to eliminate the capital costs of doing it yourself. You may not have complete control, or get everything your heart desires in a mail solution, but the price sure is right. It will be interesting to see how long these companies can go without charging for these services.
Another "Software as a Service" cloud company is SalesForce.com, which provides software to manage customer relations management (CRM) and sales campaigns. Not having to build out the infrastructure for these applications internally can save big money on capital investments, and enable the people in the IT department to focus on delivering new customer facing applications which impact the bottom line.
The desire for companies to reduce costs and focus IT on core business applications which can increase profits and shareholder value brings us to the killer apps for the cloud.
you look at the cost factors driving IT, backup and DR are the two biggest chunks of TCO expenses incurred.
It takes a lot of time and money to protect the growing amount of data, and with the government increasing regulatory oversight and mandating that data be kept around for years for review, costs and complexity are increasing rapidly. The desire to have someone else worry about it for you and take that monkey off your back is not only good business, its human nature.
As an example, I just moved to a new home, and it just so happens that the previous owners had hired a lawn service. Now being a frugal guy, I had never used a professional lawn service before, so I was spending most of my summers and fall weekends either mowing the lawn or raking leaves myself. I was going to let the lawn service owner know we no longer needed his services.
In an interesting turn of events, I happened by the new house one day prior to moving in while the guys were doing the yard. I noticed that what would have taken me many hours to accomplish over the weekend, these guys were able to do at what seemed light speed to me.
Start to finish, about an hour. Looking at how wonderful everything looked when they were done, I called the owner to ask what he had been spending per year on the service. The cost ended up being just a little over what I was spending on my previous house for rakes, bags, lawnmower repairs, weedkiller, etc. Suffice to say, I no longer mow my own lawn, or rake my own leaves. It gets done by a couple of professional guys in around an hour, and now I have my weekends back!
So how does this relate to backup and DR? Just think of all the free time you will have to focus on core applications if you no longer had to worry about backup and disaster recovery. Just hire a cloud service provider to come in with a solution to securely and efficiently suck all your data over to their secure offsite location for a small fee per month.
You can get rid of your tapes, tape drives, backup software, replication solution and DR site. Now add all that up, plus the time it saves, and you can see how virtualization, continuous protection, and data deduplication enable more cost effective cloud-based services for backup and DR. 2010 will be a huge year for the cloud!
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