The cloud is the new standard in the IT management arena; data managers have come to rely on the cloud for its efficiency, scalability, availability and data protection. Yet many business owners and IT managers still believe that High Availability and Disaster Recovery in the cloud are out of reach financially. Well, the good news is the cloud has made HA & DR more affordable than ever.
Among the numerous advantages of cloud solutions is the inherent value of off-site IT management. Purely from the standpoint of scalability and accessibility, the cloud allows businesses to adapt rapidly to changes in the business climate, and that translates to money in the bank. But from the crucial perspectives of High Availability and Disaster Recovery alone, cost savings of cloud management can be significant.
Consider the complications of hosting your infrastructure on-premises. On a typical business day your on-site servers are humming along, performing as usual, doing an adequate job of housing applications while storing and retrieving your data as needed. And then it happens: A massive power failure hits, and you’re out of juice for hours, or even for a day or more. Or a heavy storm or even a hurricane or a tornado rolls through, and suddenly you’ve got 10 inches of water in your facility. Or a fire knocks out your operation, including your data center. Not only can any of these scenarios damage your equipment, but the hours or days that your firm is down can cost your company a bundle — perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more.
Here’s where a cloud-based Disaster Recovery plan makes budgetary sense. An efficiently managed cloud backup solution allows for easy client-managed scheduling, retention, and retrieval. In the cloud environment, built-in redundancy provides a high level of protection for your mission-critical data — while incremental backups reduce backup time. The result? Little or no impact whatsoever on production applications!
High Availability is another critical factor where IT management in the cloud makes budgetary sense. Your customers come to expect a high level of service, and you rely on High Availability to provide impeccable service 100 percent of the time. Yet when that level of continuity breaks down, it’s disruptive to your ability to service customers, and it can be enormously costly to your bottom line. Maintaining availability is essential in keeping up with customers’ demands; any breakdown can disrupt that relationship. A cloud-based High Availability solution ensures “Always On” enterprise resources that are hosted in a Tier-3 data center. It’s a true, reliable, cloud-based High Availability solution designed specifically to seamlessly scale system processor, memory and storage resources as needed — while providing optional Host- or Hardware-based replication. For businesses looking to maintain continuity and keep products and services moving, it’s a no-brainer. And for managers watching the bottom line, it’s just plain smart.
In short, realizing how High Availability and Disaster Recovery are critical components of your business, a SIAS representative can show you how easy — and cost-effective — they are to integrate into your organization.