The cloud offers users many benefits, like resource availability, scalability, elasticity and affordable cloud hosting but one of the most significant benefits is in the realm of disaster recovery. The cloud’s cost effectiveness has lowered the bar for smaller companies making it possible to employ affordable disaster recovery plans for their entire IT infrastructure.
How The Cloud Enables Disaster Recovery
Because the cloud is a virtual environment, disaster recovery takes a different tack. Virtualization means a company’s server, operating system, applications, and data is stored as a single software bundle, or virtual server. Because it is virtual and not hardware based, this server can be copied or backed up to an offsite data center and put onto another virtual server in minutes.
This virtualization means that the operating system, applications and data can be safely, securely, and accurately transferred from one data center to another in a different location without having to physically load components onto a hardware server. This reduces recovery time and cost exponentially when compared to conventional disaster recovery methods where physical servers need to be rebuilt before tape back-up can be restored.
The cost-effectiveness and immediacy of disaster recovery on the cloud makes tape backup obsolete. With affordable cloud hosting, disaster recovery becomes an extremely effective action as critical data can be backed-up to another server, site, or private host platform in minutes.
The Path of Disaster Recovery = Networking
Cloud computing has created a sea change in disaster recovery. Because of the nature of the cloud, network replication is the critical path. By networking servers at various offsite data centers, cloud host providers can replicate the clients network at a separate disaster recovery site including all IP address mapping, firewall rules and VLAN configurations.
Togglebox, a cloud host provider, and other smart data center operators provide full disaster recovery services that not only replicate servers between data centers, but can also replicate entire network configurations. This means that network configurations can be recovered as quickly as backed up cloud servers. Often with no noticeable disruption in service. By using technology like “pilot light” environments that are ready to scale up in seconds, to “hot standby” environments that enable rapid failover, data center operators like Togglebox are prepared to quickly, and securely enable rapid recovery of clients IT infrastructure, networks and data.
The cloud has changed the way we work, collaborate, and share data. Affordable cloud hosting has made rapid disaster recovery cost effective for small to medium sized businesses. By using a cloud host provider, businesses can expect fast performance, elasticity of their network, easy scalability and rapid and secure disaster recovery services. As more companies look to control costs, the cloud can eliminate replacement of hardware, duplication of offsite IT infrastructure, and business downtime if it ever becomes necessary to address a serious IT disaster. Migrating to the cloud is a smart business decision.