Last week I was reading this article on Cloud Recovery, by our fellow cloud vendor Geminare’s CEO, Joshua Geist.
The thrust of Joshua’s excellent writing is about the concept of Cloud Recovery, or as some are calling it; RaaS, Recovery as a Service. As Joshua quite rightly points out, the cloud makes a perfect platform from which to launch disaster recover and business continuity efforts.
But, should the discussion be limited to just ‘Recovery’? I think there are many more important aspects to consider, not least continuity or the ability for your users to ‘continue’ working during the outage. Recovery, in my mind, picks up the pieces afterwards. Continuity is king!
Enter the Cloud
The article makes a solid argument for using the Cloud to the best of its advantage, especially for services like backup and recovery. The market seems to agree – when presented with reduced cost and complexity by moving to the cloud it’s hard not to be in the headlines. As CRN reported this week from the Nth Generation Technical Symposium, some 23% of the attendees claimed to be using cloud services for DR and BCP.
And this is not just limited to businesses either. Many of today’s RaaS models grew up on lessons learned from consumers, who have had access to cloud based backup and recovery services for some time, the latest being directed at their social networking persona’s by the likes of the excellent, Boston based, Backupify.
What’s missing?
I can’t help but think that Cloud Backup, RaaS or just plain old Backup and Recovery is missing something, and that just limiting the discussion to “Recovery” is, …well… limiting.
Geist touches on this slightly at the end of the article…
Imagine, businesses that operate in high-risk areas such as hurricane alley engaging a Cloud Recovery provider minutes after notification of impending risks, deploying a high availability solution on the fly, and unplugging their servers the same day that a warning is issued.
.. the use of the phrase “deploying a high availability solution” is what I’m after, that’s where the real value is added. The ability for your users to continue working whilst the outage and subsequent recovery is occurring.
A solid recovery strategy based on RaaS is going to make life a lot easier than relying on a dubious tape based strategy, but the organization is still subject to an RPO & RTO for each service or infrastructure.
Enter CaaS Keep reading…
