Venyu Blog

A recently released report produced by Forrester Research found that when it comes to disaster planning 12% to 15% of its SMB customers are using the Cloud for online backup services, including disaster recovery. The report, entitled “How The Cloud Will Transform Disaster Recovery Services,” outlines both the benefits and costs of disaster recovery plans in the cloud including:

• Transparent and subscription-based pricing. Pricing includes all the software, infrastructure and services to deliver the solution and customers pay only for the servers they want to protect.
• Fast and easy deployment. Because there’s no need to reserve identical hardware, set up proprietary links or negotiate a specific SLA, most of the recovery configuration can be done online.
• Oversubscription risk is minimized. Moving DR plans to the cloud enables far more customers to be packed onto the same physical IT infrastructure. This paradigm overcomes the risks of traditional DR services where several clients might be subscribed to the same IT resources (and the same single point of failure) if multiple, simultaneous disasters are declared from clients subscribed from the same region to the same equipment.
• Reduced penalty for rehearsing. Cloud-based DR services require minimal or no prep time, allowing users to rehearse more easily and at much lower cost than traditional DR  services where equipment, as well as manpower, needs to be reserved ahead of time.

Forrester analyst Stephanie Balaouras concludes that while many SMBs are still choosing to backing up data locally and using cloud providers as a storage vault, the cloud is quickly taking its place as another tool that SMBs can use to cut costs and form the basis of a disaster recovery plan.