Cloud Computing For Disaster Recovery

It’s been quite a year for natural disasters. Fires scorching thousands of acres at a time, rivers overflowing their banks, torrential rainfall, tornadoes everywhere. Are you feeling a little nervous that your business could be taken out at any time?

Sadly, an unfortunate twist of fate can hit anyone at any time. You probably already have some protections in place, such as property insurance, tape or disk file backups and maybe even offsite storage of important files. Ask yourself this, however. How will you get your business back running immediately after a catastrophic local disaster?

While having copies of critical documents and customer files may prevent you from going out of business permanently if disaster strikes, they aren’t enough to keep you running without a hiccup. For that you need backup infrastructure as well as files. A generation ago, that meant duplicate data centers that were located far apart. The idea is that the kind of disaster that wipes out your facilities is unlikely to hit two geographically separated areas simultaneously. If you are prone to earthquakes, one data center can be local but the other must be in an earthquake free zone. The same thing applies to hurricanes. If you are on the coast, your backup must be far inland.

Today’s disaster recovery solution of choice is the cloud. With infrastructure, platform and software as a service, you can do anything in the cloud that you would do in-house. The advantage is that the cloud is often far, far away.

Why choose a cloud solution over doing it all yourself? Avoidance of enormous capital investment is a very good reason. It’s not hard to spend millions creating the environmentally controlled and secure facilities with robust backup power and multiple diverse bandwidth connections, not to mention the racks and racks of equipment inside. This is one reason why many businesses decide that regular system backups are good enough. If the worst happens, they’ll simply get an insurance settlement and order replacement equipment. Oh? How long will that take? Just what is your income stream going to look line in the ensuing days, weeks or months?

One advantage of the cloud is that it scales fast. You could decide to have a minimal cloud solution implemented right now for the monthly fee it takes for storage and limited server capacity. If you get knocked out where are, you can log-into the cloud from wherever you can get a broadband connection and scale up in minutes or hours. When the crises is over, you can back off from all the virtual servers and go into a standby mode.

By the way, that cloud storage makes an excellent backup for your local files. Cloud storage is robust and almost infinitely scalable. This alone can be the justification for having a backup operation in the cloud.

What if you are in the cloud already? It’s not unknown for cloud systems to suffer outages just like anything else technical. In this case you may want to have a minimal backup system locally, in a colocation facility or set up as a private cloud in a different data center.

Hosted PBX phone systems can also keep you running after a disaster, almost like nothing ever happened. At least that’s the way your customers will perceive. it. You only need a network bandwidth connection and a few SIP phones to get your calls and voicemail. Being a network voice system, those SIP phones can be located just about anywhere... even somewhere else in the country.

Are you apprehensive that your business may not be protected from shutdown as much as you’d like? It may not be that expensive to have backup computing and telephone service in the cloud. Check options and prices now and rest easier that you have a recovery solution.

Telecom Providers Build Their Own Clouds

Just as cloud companies are beginning to mature as businesses, Internet service providers and other carriers have decided to build out their own cloud offerings. Now, how does a harried IT manager or small business owner sort through all the various opportunities?

It’s important to remember that we are in the early days of the cloud. Like all new technologies, this one has a maturity or learning curve. We are on the early part of the upward slope. What that means is a lot of activity from a lot of players. You can expect new companies with new services to be popping up all the time. It also makes sense that current players in the computer and networking space will want to corral as much of this business for themselves as possible. If not, they may be justifiably concerned that they could be relegated to sidelines.

Windstream, a major competitive carrier for T1 lines, MPLS networks, dedicated Ethernet Internet and enterprise VoIP, saw the handwriting on the wall when they acquired Hosted Solutions last year. Adding the assets of Hosted Solutions to Windstream’s existing data centers, has given them the critical mass to get into cloud services for existing customers. Such services include such things as cloud storage, Infrastructure as a Service and private, public, and hybrid clouds. Other carriers, such as Level 3 Communications, also have cloud services available.

Most carriers have large data centers for their own use. They often leverage these assets by offering colocation services within their secure and highly reliable facilities. Colocation is something of a forerunner of the cloud. The provider offers racks and cages where you can move your servers and network appliances. They provide the electricity with backup, environmental control and security. Another big draw of colocation is the proximity to large amounts of bandwidth. Many companies either can’t get or can’t afford the cost of constructing fiber optic connections to their own facilities. At a colocation center, the carrier is right down the hall and a mere cross-connect away. It’s the best deal on bandwidth you can get.

More recently, colocation centers have begun to offer contracted technical support and even leased servers for those who don’t want to buy their own. In essence, the colo becomes your data center and you don’t need the capital expense, operational expense or staffing to run your own. That being the case, what’s different about cloud services?

The primary difference between colocation and the cloud likes in both outsourcing and virtualization. The cloud infrastructure consists of massive computing power and storage, all virtualized so that it can be sliced and diced as users require. While in the cloud, you are unaware that you are not the only one using the facilities. The same bank of servers that run your applications can be running dozens or hundreds of others simultaneously. The magic of virtualization creates the illusion that you have one or more physical servers all to yourself.

A good cloud is much more than that. Not only do you rent rather than buy, but you rent by the minute or hour times the number of servers you are using. You can add or subtract virtual servers at will and only pay for the ones you are reserving. The same is true for storage. You don’t worry about buying a new disk when you fill up the one you have. You simply increase or decrease storage as needed and pay by the byte.

The ability to increase and decrease resources almost instantly is a feature unique to the cloud. This scalability is highly desirable for companies with varying loads or ones that are rapidly growing. There is no need to be constantly buying and upgrading equipment when you can simply log into your cloud account and add resources at will.

What carriers bring to the table is one stop shopping. They already provide last mile access, multi-site connectivity, and converged voice, video and data networks. By adding cloud services, you have one bill to pay and a single point of contact for resolving issues such as latency or availability. Independent cloud service providers will need to be on their toes to stay ahead of the carriers, by offering more advanced services and lower pricing to stay in the game long term.

Are you ready for the cloud? The range of services and competitive pricing makes cloud computing and storage, colocation and managed services more cost effective than they’ve ever been. Inquire about availability and pricing for the networking and computing services you need for your particular applications.