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THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY
The amount of media hype around cloud is at an all time high. Some may argue that using a cloud service is cheaper than traditional computing; another common cloud value proposition is that it enables a more rapid transition to mobile computing. However, there's one use case for cloud that often falls under the radar - it enables better disaster recovery, which is something that many organisations, large and small, struggle with.

The ability to store data in the cloud has made life a lot easier for users - not only is it easy to sign up for and fast to implement, cloud-based storage is designed to be user-friendly, providing seemingly limitless availability of new capacity and access to enterprise class facilities. Traditional data apps are not mobile apps, however, once a data app is 'cloudified' it can offer many of the same advantages, such as access from anywhere that you can get signal, and on any connected device. However, when relying on the cloud for backup organisations can often be faced with an unstable environment. Cloud computing essentially involves the delivery of hosted services via a shared wide area network (WAN), such as the internet.

Regardless of the type of cloud initiative, they all have one thing in common - data is centralised, while users are distributed. This environment can be prone to instability, which can jeopardise entire storage investments.

Failing to address this and ensure a stable network, can lead to higher disaster recovery costs and missed Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs). This can result in increased expenditures as organisations try to make up for limited replication throughput and poor connectivity by buying more WAN capacity.

It is therefore critical that organisations are aware that the only way to ensure optimal data delivery is to establish a fully equipped network that will be able to cope with the increased flow of traffic storage initiatives bring. To do this, organisations need to optimise the WAN, which can reduce over 90 percent of the traffic across the network and provide the scalability needed to support all current and emerging applications.

CONSIDERING THE OPTIONS
The prospect of storing data in the cloud can be daunting for some organisations, so there are a number of alternatives to cloud backup. These include traditional tape-based, disk-based or hybrid storage. A good option is off-site disk backup, which is an ideal business continuity upgrade for organisations that need the shortest possible recovery time when disaster strikes, but cannot afford to replicate their entire systems to a duplicate data centre.

When comparing these alternatives, disk backup is almost always faster than tape, because there are none of the data-seek or media mount delays typical of tape. With tape, you have to wait for the media and the drive to become ready before you can access the data.

The key thing for business continuity and disaster recovery is that the disk backup is off-site, either at a secondary site, or at a co-location centre. The challenge for many organisations will therefore be the WAN traffic involved in doing that disk-based offsite backup - and, of course, recovery.

DON'T GET STRANDED IN THE CLOUD
Technical requirements need to be carefully considered as data that is stranded in the cloud is useless. If business critical data is going to be protected in the cloud, there needs to be a way to restore the data into a Virtual Machine (VM), or onto a physical server, for rapid recovery. If the data must be downloaded first, the solution should not be used for anything critical.

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