Disaster Recovery services have been empowered by the Cloud because users can take advantage of the pay-as-you go elasticity of Cloud services, making Disaster Recovery objectives easier to fulfill with less of an investment. With advances in technology, solution providers are now starting to leverage the Cloud to deliver backup/disaster recovery services to business. These services, managed by professionals, will protect data and make their operations more efficient. This article will explore the top reasons why the Cloud should be used as a Service.
Data is critical to running an effective business today, and this trend is continuing to grow. Today, data is the life force for the modern business, it is ever more important to protect it. Companies must reduce the times needed to perform backups and simultaneously increase the times for recovery. All of this must be achieved with other concerns such as business continuity and regulatory compliance. Legacy systems such as off-site tape libraries will not cut it in fast paced, data driven environment that we live in today.
Although disaster recovery is a critical component for businesses today, it can also be a costly endeavor. With the many expenses required to run a business, investing into an in-house disaster recovery operation might not have a strong value. Costs associated with infrastructure, staff, training, software etc will add up and can start invading other planned initiatives. Leveraging a Disaster Recovery service from a solution provider could help off-load these costs and distractions, giving the business much more freedom.
Cloud services enable flexible businesses models, scaling and budgeting now becomes increasingly nimble. For companies with limited budgets or IT Teams, this is an incredibly valuable development. Businesses that leverage solution providers to run their disaster recovery in the Cloud will enjoy a plug and play service, with reduced costs and an OPEX (operational expense) billing model that’s easy to grow and budget for.
When management understands these benefits, they can easily see the value. Therefore, this is one of the fastest growing segments of the IT service industry. Regardless of the size of a business, protecting proprietary data must be an absolute priority. The following will review some of the more specific benefits of outsourcing backups.
Efficiency
Most companies operate their IT departments with minimum budgets. This leaves works stretched thin and kept busy. With many chores, employees tasked with managing IT operations will tend to become good at all, but masters of none. Treating your IT staff like a tech janitor opens the doors for poor work and mistakes. Not only does it keep them overworked, it also distracts them from making proactive initiatives that can add more value to the business. Digital transformation, leveraging data, increasing productivity are all examples of lost opportunities. Instead of spending all your time trying t keep the lights on, businesses can offload workloads such as backups and start using IT to improve worker productivity. Service partners can deliver solutions to meet your bushiness' needs on day one.
Total Cost of Ownership
The human resource component of an IT operations is not the only expense required in running it effectively. Costs can easily double, if not triple when you start evaluating the costs of hardware and software infrastructure. Scaling the infrastructure is also a concern as data grows exponentially with the business, and more money will be required to invest into ever-expanding infrastructure. This model is currently dated, but many companies continue to operate this way. Cloud computing exists specifically to tackle this issue, providing businesses the opportunity to leverage infrastructure on demand. No more capital investments, just using the resources like a utility. Long gone are the days of having to invests into servers, storage, virtualization etc – components that add up fast. Admin/service providers can take advantage of Cloud computing’s elastic scalability and billing model to fuel the disaster recovery infrastructure. Having physical infrastructure, fully paid-off, and sitting around waiting for a disaster just doesn’t make sense anymore.
Embracing OPEX
Today’s CFOs and business leaders embrace an OPEX model for IT investment today. With IT infrastructure being a commodity, no one wants to spend their liquid assets on large IT- based investments when they can get them on demand. This enables business leaders much more flexibility in managing funds and better planning when it comes to budgeting. With more efficient tools built for the Cloud, the management of these systems is now becoming easier. With IT becoming more service oriented, more and more of the operation can be wrapped up into a full monthly expenditure. Embracing OPEX will help organizations simplify their IT operations and budgets, while setting the stage to move the entire production into the Cloud.
Implement Best Practices
The standard mantra for backing up data is to follow the 3-2-1 practice. This is a defined operation for backing up and securing data as follows:
- Make sure that you retain at least 3 copies of data
- Store your data in 2 completely different types of storage media
- Keep 1 copy in a diverse geographic location
Due to limited bandwidth and the lack of a second physical site, many companies struggle to accomplish the 3-2-1 practice. With data volumes continuing to grow, engineering resources and infrastructure will be in more of a demand. A team that specializes in providing backup/DR as a service will have all the appropriate measures built and be able to easily deploy them for their customers.
Experience
As the Cloud becomes more embraced in time, businesses are finding that it is beneficial to align themselves with a service provider that knows how to navigate the landscape. Although backing up data may seem simple, putting all the pieces together is often quite challenging. The reason for the challenges is due to diverse need and objectives across many various types of business. The service provider is often tasked with aligning the best outcomes to a customer’s budget and/or regulatory needs. Service providers that leverage the flexibility of the Cloud can deliver exceptional value to the end user.
Protection
In case wasn’t obvious enough, protecting your data and your company’s productivity is the main objective with disaster recovery planning. If you are leaving this role to trained professionals, you are eliminating risks. Since they live and breathe in this space, there’s generally little that has come across their paths that would surprise them. Trusting in a partner and allowing them to engineer a valid solution will give your business the insurance it needs to protect their assets. Now with Cloud availability, they can increase the dynamics of the solution and set better objectives with smaller investment.
There are several components to consider when evaluating a solution from a service provider
Partners should be working with industry leading software that enables them to work within and across virtual environments. This includes image level encapsulations of environments in Data Centers and in public Clouds. End to end encryption is also an important feature that will hep with protecting data that is constantly in flight.
Experience within an ecosystem of Cloud technologies helps to accomplish a wider range of solutions. Service providers must understand the multiple technologies that they will encounter: Virtualization, AWS, Azure, Google and many database related technologies.
Frameworks and functions can be rolled out to fit specific use cases that will range from simple backups to sophisticated, Geo-diverse, always on systems. Cloud partners should understand how to align an engineering build to accomplish desired outcomes.
Mindcentric partners with Veeam to provide managed backup solutions for businesses of all sizes. Our team has built custom solutions for businesses with complex requirements since 1999. Backup and Disaster recovery is a core component of what we do, and we bring the following advantages:
- Two (2) Tier-4 Data Centers with private 10G Network
- Purpose Built Backup Architecture
- Complete Visibility and Control
- Partnership with AWS, Microsoft and Wasabi
- End to end encryption (also at rest)
Mindcentric operates out of Carlsbad California and has offices in Las Vegas and New York. Our team is a leading Cloud solutions provider with a diverse portfolio of value-added services.
Veeam Software is a privately held information technology company that develops backup, disaster recovery data management software for virtual, physical and multi-cloud infrastructures. The company’s headquarters are in Baar, Switzerland.