Cloud Backup and Recovery Infrastructure

If you are an enterprise CIO or a SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) technology officer, the issue as to the safety and security of data would be uppermost on your mind. This is because of the fact that enterprises have to not only backup data but also have failsafe recovery options.

With enterprises including SME’s churning out ever larger amounts of data, CIO’s and technology officers have to ensure that there is a viable and reliable backup plan in place. In earlier years, the tape based backup and the disk based backup ensured that data recovery could be done onsite.

In recent years, with the introduction of the cloud as a service, CIO’s find that recovery of data from the cloud is less cumbersome and more efficient. This point to the fact that cloud based backup is gaining in prominence because of its reliability and ease of use.

However, one cannot completely say that cloud based backup and recovery infrastructure does magical things to the enterprise. The old rule of thumb that the more data you lose, the harder it is to recover and more time consuming certainly holds true for the cloud based backups as well. As many CIO’s would attest, cloud based backup is spread over a number of sites and clouds so that the recovery would mean that all these sites have to be accessed.

The moral of the story here is that CIO’s should not expect the moon from the cloud as a backup and recovery mechanism. What they can expect though is that the cloud would certainly do wonders to their backup and recovery strategies. This is mainly due to the fact that porting to a backup server is easier when one is using a cloud based mechanism for backup and recovery.

SME’s would particularly like the fact that they need not invest in expensive backup and storage devices as well as engage personnel to do the backup and recovery. Once they have migrated to the cloud, the infrastructure of the cloud provider takes care of all aspects of backup and recovery thereby saving time and money for the SME’s. No wonder the SME’s are beating a path to the cloud based vendors for migrating their applications to the cloud. Especially for those enterprises that have a lot of customer touch points, backup and recovery of customer data are paramount and hence something that keeps the CIO’s awake at night.

Finally, these are early days for judging the effectiveness of cloud based backup and recovery. There have been embarrassing instances of the cloud providers suffering outages and hence one cannot say with confidence that the cloud is the answer to all the ailments. However, what one can say is that the cloud based backup and recovery option is a game changer provided one uses the potential of the cloud and leverages its power effectively. In conclusion, the times they are a changing and CIO’s of both large as well as small and medium sized enterprises have something to smile about when they arrive for work every day.

Tagged as: CIO, cloud backup, data, disaster, Enterprise, infrastructure, recovery, SME