How the Cloud is Changing Disaster Recovery

There is nothing any business fears more than a complete collapse of its IT systems. The financial cost of such an outage can be great, and additionally retrieving the data and rebuilding the system into its former state is often an extremely time consuming and logistically complex proposition. Businesses have literally gone under due to such IT issues, and although this is something that many companies dread, often small and mid-market firms don’t have sufficient provisions in place to provide effective disaster recovery.

It is a basic facet of human psychology that we often assume that the best case scenario will occur, and nothing fundamentally will go wrong. This tendency is amplified in the case of disaster recovery, where providing satisfactory backup for a business can involve a certain financial outlay.

However, this is changing with the increasing prominence of the cloud, which offers businesses fantastic opportunities to put disaster recovery procedures in place at an affordable price. The most obvious benefit of the cloud is that it offers businesses the opportunity to backup and replicate all of its data completely off-site. This goes beyond the obvious advantage of not having data completely wiped out in a business-wide outage; it also helps protect companies against problems cause by regional phenomena or malicious cyber-attacks. The cloud gives businesses the opportunity to store a vast amount of data in a location that can truly be described as remote, yet grants immediate access to that data from anywhere in the world, whenever it is required.

It is no surprise then that more and more businesses are turning to the cloud for disaster recovery plans and provisions. Not only does it offer convenience, but it also provides a very cost effective solution to disaster recovery issues. With cloud computing at the heart of a company’s disaster recovery plans, there is no need for any expensive outlay on backup systems, whether software or hardware-based.

Additionally, rooting your disaster recovery plan in the cloud ensures that any downtime is kept to a bare minimum. Because it is possible to access all of your data at all times via the cloud, the ability to get back online quickly in a worst-case scenario becomes far more feasible than in traditional backup methods.

Large companies often have strong disaster recovery plans in place, but the cloud is making such strategies an affordable reality for the small and mid-market.  No wonder that some IT experts believe that disaster recovery is one of the most valuable applications of cloud technology.

If you’re concerned about your recovery capabilities or would be interested in a free IT risk assessment, contact Thrive Networks today.