Key Considerations for Data Protection in the Cloud


Written by Phil on December 15, 2009 in Disaster Recovery.

Explosive data growth is a fact of today’s information age, as business processes in companies of all sizes have become fully dependent on digital data and electronic communications. Any interruption of data accessibility or any data loss or corruption caused by a hardware or software malfunction will have a direct effect on revenue and business viability. Natural disasters can be even more devastating to businesses by interrupting all operations for an extended period of time and potentially causing major data losses.

But deploying a comprehensive data protection solution – beyond traditional backup methodologies – that will provide continuous data availability and full disaster recovery (DR) capability is prohibitively expensive for many small and medium-size businesses. This is why cloud backup and DR services are commanding tremendous interest, and why they will be among the hottest areas of the storage market in 2010.

Cloud data protection services are less expensive than owning one’s own data protection infrastructure, provide an immediate off-site location for DR, and are inherently scalable; and the costs are based on how much data one needs to store and protect, not on how much equipment one needs to purchase, install, and maintain. But how does one evaluate the relative strengths of a wide array of service offerings? What are the key criteria to look for in a solution that will provide safe, reliable and secure backup and DR in the cloud?

Cloud storage services significantly reduce costs related to data protection processes. In this time of ongoing slow economic growth and limited IT budgets, cloud storage can play a key role in business efficiency, changing the way IT infrastructure is managed. If customers demand the right services at the right price, the cloud will revolutionize one of the most important security measures any company can take to ensure business continuity, which is what data protection is ultimately all about.

See Key Considerations for Data Protection in the Cloud, by Fadi Albatal for The Datacenter Journal.

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