In the older days, backup meant hundreds of tapes being sent to a data center daily or weekly. The location of this data center was crucial – far enough to not be affected by the same disasters yet close enough to reach physically. In the event of a disaster, it took 3-4 days to get your data infrastructure back in place and start operating. We have all heard stories of businesses that could never really get back after a devastating natural disaster. Cloud Storage providers are an answer to a lot of these backup woes and have dramatically streamlined the recovery process.
The first benefit of Cloud backups is the elimination of location concerns. You should still check where your Cloud provider’s data centers are located and whether the company spreads data across multiple disaster-proof centers, but it is highly unlikely that the cloud storage provider will be based in your locality. And since there is no physical movement of data, transportation logistics can be eschewed. Furthermore, backup in the cloud can be done in real-time, depending on the upload limits of your provider.
Cloud Disaster Recovery has been known to be a lot faster than traditional recovery, and many cloud storage providers can also provide you temporary cloud servers. That way, you can run data remote on their servers until your IT is back in place. Some companies prefer a hybrid approach, where central data is backed up on the cloud but the lowest hanging data is backed up on a dedicated local host. This allows companies to continue daily operations in the most basic sense, while the cloud provider works on restoring the backbone data.
Whichever model you choose, nothing is absolutely perfect. The key to efficacious Disaster Recovery lies in the traditional trial, error, fix-the-error and try again procedure!