In Case Of Disaster, Turn To Cloud

Disaster recovery is one of those eat-your-spinach topics: not glamorous, not fun, not appealing but good for you. A new report predicts that cloud computing will transform the backup, recovery, and business continuity markets and hit the sweet spot for many SMBs.The $499 Forrester report, How The Cloud Will Transform Disaster Recovery Services, identifies a gap between old-school recovery from tape, which is affordable but doesn't offer much in the way of continuity protection because it takes so long to restore; and very expensive, enterprise-targeted high-end recovery services. Forrester foresees existing online backup providers plus new entrants into the market starting to leverage cloud storage to offer reasonably priced options with reasonably quick recovery times that might entice SMBs away from their tape backups.

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The report does warn that online backup is not the same as disaster recovery. "Its important to understand that some services dont provide complete DR but only data recovery. This is true of many storage-as-a-service and backup-as-a-service offerings. They back up data to their site, but they dont have a backup of your system images or the ability to host you at their site." The report cites SunGard and Venyu as providers that are building out SMB-oriented backup services that can be the foundations for full disaster recovery systems.

The most familiar online backup options are "agent-based," meaning you download software to the machines to be backed up, and that software manages the uploading of data to the cloud. The problem here is that restoration of any significant amount of lost data requires waiting for the provider to send it on a disk, meaning your business won't be full recovered for at least a day.

Appliance-based services, by contrast, combine a local storage device which is then backed up to the cloud. That way, if your primary storage fails, you can restore quickly from the local device, but you also gain the benefits of offsite backup. bMighty's new, free Business Case Builder for business continuity devices can help you decide if that approach is best for your operation.

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