By Suhas Sreedhar
Disasters strike in all shapes and sizes, from storms, floods, and fires to hardware malfunctions and massive data corruption. The ability to recover infrastructure quickly and reliably afterward can often mean life or death for a business. Traditional disaster recovery solutions came at a high cost, requiring physical backup sites or massive redundant hardware that wasn't scalable, or efficient.
Today, cloud-based disaster recovery services offer far more intelligent, flexible, and cost-effective solutions for business continuity after catastrophic events. Cloud-based recovery provides many advantages, but chief among them is flexibility. A business can choose to prioritize its most vital applications so that after a disaster essential operations can be restored quickly--usually within a couple of hours--before other less-essential services are brought back.
This not only ensures that a business can be up-and-running soon after an incident, but also saves on cost by allocating the fastest, most powerful, most secure, highest-cost technologies to the core functions of a business. More cost-effective and efficient disaster recovery also means many more businesses can now insure their IT infrastructure against catastrophes, ultimately benefiting consumers by not leading to a lengthy loss of services--even in rare emergencies.
"We're hosted out of Minneapolis," said Alan Childs, Vice President of Information Technology for MetaFarms, a software solution provider for farmers managing livestock data. "We have a lot of top, public, Fortune 500 companies as our customers--and we had one data center. If a catastrophic event happened in Minneapolis, we'd have no way to recover."
MetaFarms first looked into physical hot and cold backup sites, but determined they weren't cost effective or efficient. Instead, it opted to implement a cloud-based disaster recovery solution.
"Our entire platform--servers, database, applications, everything-- is on cloud-based backup. They're literally in sync down to the last transaction," Childs said. "About once a year we fully test the system by turning off our local data center and seeing everything instantly restored from various other facilities. We don't have to worry about losing anything in the transition; the data is already there."
MetaFarms is so pleased with the cloud-based disaster recovery model that it's beginning to look at moving entirely to a cloud-based infrastructure.
Adds Childs, "When we'd expand our database, applications, and infrastructure we'd just have to make a phone call and our bill would go up. There'd be no big planning or leasing effort involved. Maintaining all of our equipment is a burden we simply wouldn't have."
Suhas Sreedhar has been covering trends in science and technology for six years, writing on topics from cloud computing to audio engineering to neuroscience. He has previously written for IEEE Spectrum magazine.
