The Savenet Solutions MD continued, saying that, “this means that if the office is inaccessible due to flood or fire, employees could be sent to work from home, a hotel conference centre, a managed service office or a subsidiary office or a combination of all options. This results in faster business continuity recovery times and saves costs by not having to rent traditional hot seats every year.”
Widespread deployment
Logicalis’ Cashman told TechPro that he and his colleagues have seen “widespread deployment” of private cloud infrastructure solutions across its traditional customer base in recent months, while DRaaS continues to hit a sweet spot for “smaller customers”.
Datapac’s Kinsella meanwhile said that another approach which is becoming more popular is the re-use of the customer’s existing hardware for BCDR purposes. He explained that customers who have applications and data that suit relocation to the public cloud are using their existing hardware as a BCDR solution for the public cloud in which they’re hosted.
“Their servers and data are being replicated from the public cloud to hardware they own,” said Kinsella. “In the event of an outage in the public cloud platform, their data and applications can be made available at their own facility.”
Looking ahead into 2015, Naughton of Ward Solutions said he expected cloud-to-cloud back-ups for software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings to become more prevalent. Many cloud application users, he said, are surprised to learn that their SaaS vendors can’t help them recover data when mistakes happen on the user’s side. “These offerings automate the protection of critical data that is stored with SaaS providers so organisations can recover this data if it is accidentally, or maliciously, deleted.”
Disaster avoidance
As for what else will influence the BCDR market over the coming year to 18 months, Owen Mulcahy of Comsys said simply “If I could answer that, I would be down to either the patent office or giving my broker a call enquiring whether or not I could invest in the next greatest thing.”
However, on a more serious note, he said if he “were a betting man”, he would be placing a few shillings on EMC to make some serious manoeuvres in this space in the not too distant future. “They seem to be leading the way amongst the innovators within the business continuity and disaster avoidance market and have proven ground-breaking [credentials] in creating the new standards.”
Trilogy’s Paddon was another who commented on the difficulty of picking out trends in this area over the coming 18 months or so. He did add though that, “We are likely to see increasingly mature cloud and service-based DR solutions which are easier to invoke, less bandwidth-dependent and that start to address the raft of security and data sovereignty concerns that are still being worked through in cloud services.
“Converged networks, full infrastructure virtualisation and hybrid cloud architectures will most likely mature to allow these approaches to be factored into service continuity and DR designs,” he added. Meanwhile for Renaissance’s Conway, he said he believes that companies operating within this space will be “implementing resilient infrastructures with built in failsafe redundancy and real-time back-up”.
As that happens, said Conway, organisations can take over “control of their own destiny”. The reductions in cost and increased availability of affordable bandwidth has made this achievable, he added.
Unpredictable
For Data Solutions’ O’Haire, the next year in the BCDR space will see cloud play a bigger role in organisations’ plans. “While smaller companies or those with no legacy IT baggage can operate with fully cloud hosted IT services, the majority need to retain and protect their on-premise infrastructure,” he said. “These businesses may not yet trust their primary systems to cloud but are more willing to adopt appropriate cloud services to help with disaster recovery.”
Naughton though, of Ward Solutions, summed up the unpredictable nature of the industry as indicated by Mulcahy and Paddon, when noting that the number of climate-related disasters have been “increasing three times in the last 30 years”. This means that businesses, particularly those with locations across the globe, have to embrace an uncertain future and deal with it correctly.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers