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Latest figures from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) indicate that cloud adoption is at its highest figure to date, with 78 per cent of organisations now having formally adopted at least one type of cloud-based service. TechNavio echoes this surge and in particular the surge in growth of disaster recovery as a service, forecasting a compound annual growth rate of 54.64 per cent between 2014 and 2018. However, despite the striking numbers and growth expectations there are still many IT professionals out there who have fears about adopting disaster recovery as a service.
Today, most companies are beginning to realise that they are not well prepared to face adversities. Right now business and IT executives want guarantees that disaster recovery processes actually work and they owe it to themselves, their employees, customers and investors to make sure this is the case.
That said, we constantly hear that most IT executives cannot satisfactorily answer a simple question: “If your systems went down, would your company be able to get them up and running again within a timeframe that meets your business requirements and are you able to recover critical business data?”
A recent example that just highlights how easily this can happen is the lightning strike that hit one of Google’s data centres four times and resulted in some people losing their data forever. Losing data is never a good thing, but losing data forever, as a business is unthinkable. Apparently a number of the disks in the Belgian data centre were completely wiped, meaning some people have permanently lost files. This event illustrates that even providers like Google can find themselves subject to acts of nature that can disrupt or destroy critical business data.
This underlines the need for all businesses to adopt geographic and even multi-vendor redundancy to ensure proper measures for disaster recovery. The good news is that the industry has evolved to the point that there are disaster recovery solutions for any budget – as long as we can convince those that are worried about DRaaS.
IT folks who have fears around DRaaS tend to become the ‘worriers’ or ‘blockers’ in their organisations and resist attempts from IT management and the C-suite to implement a cloud-based disaster recovery solution. That’s not good for either them or the organisation as the potential for data centre outages is only increasing and DRaaS is a proven, reliable and cost-effective way to maintain business continuity when faced with a disaster.
So, what specifically is IT afraid of when it comes to DRaaS? We’ve found it falls into three main areas:
– Losing control and visibility – you don’t want your applications and data sent into the abyss. You want to know exactly where everything is at all times, how it is performing and define exactly what needs to be failed over and when.
– Trusting cloud infrastructure – trusting your data and applications to a cloud service provider and being able to rely on that in a disaster is a challenge for many, particularly for those in highly regulated industries such as healthcare and finance.
– Uncontrollable costs – one of the reassuring things about a physical disaster recovery solution is that costs are predictable – you may want to avoid complex DRaaS pricing algorithms that make budgeting a nightmare. IT should be wary about hidden costs in any disaster recovery or backup solution.
These fears are all valid and yet all of these can be overcome with the right DRaaS solution.
In terms of maintaining control and visibility, the cloud portal that iland offers delivers granular management of cloud resources and costs. Customers can view performance, capacity and usage metrics, initiate failover and failback, re-allocate workloads and much more. With that kind of control, the IT ‘worriers’ should have no need to fear the unknown – they have full visibility into their resources and costs and can proactively manage them, along with backup should they need it.
Security of cloud infrastructure should absolutely be at the top of your DRaaS shopping list. Additionally our US, UK and APAC data centres are designed to meet advanced security and compliance standards with vulnerability scanning, intrusion detection and whole disk encryption being just some of the security features. iland data centershold SSAE 16 and ISO 9001/27001 certifications and cloud to cloud replication is available if our customers need a secondary failover site.
Our DRaaS offering enables a near-zero Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and self-service testing so you get the peace of mind that comes with knowing that business continuity is assured. Mind you, we get the need for straight-forward pricing. Disaster Recovery is too important to be spending hours trying to figure out what it’s going to cost to protect your business.
So I hope you can see that if you’re a DRaaS worrier, there are now a lot fewer reasons to be afraid of DRaaS and resist implementing it in your organisation. In fact, you may want to jump on board with the DRaaS optimists.
Businesses, driven by customer expectations and auditors will begin to care about more than just data restoration, they will care about business service restoration. As a result, there is and will continue to be a greater need to verify the ability of an organisation to bring virtual and cloud-based business applications back into service within strict and very fast service level agreements.