March 3, 2017

Did you get a chance to check out our State of Disaster Recovery Report 2016? It shared some intriguing findings about how IT leaders are handling their backup and disaster recovery today. And one of the most interesting results was that 24% are relying entirely on-premises disaster recovery solutions instead of cloud-based solutions.

On the one hand, it’s a number that means everyone else – the huge majority of IT teams – are using some kind of cloud to protect their data, servers and apps. On the other hand, it’s kind of surprising that even that many are still sticking with on-premises solutions to protect all of their assets. Cloud computing isn’t exactly new. SaaS apps are such a regular part of our lives these days, that most teams are putting different workloads into the cloud without thinking twice.

Yet almost a quarter haven’t dipped their toes into cloud-based backup and disaster recovery.
That’s… interesting.

If we had to bet, their reasons are probably one of the following: • ranking BDR as a back-burner initiative compared to the rest of their IT wish list • assuming traditional backups are good enough for their needs – even if that means intermittent downtime • fears over security, or uncertainty about evaluating solutions

There are other reasons, of course. Either way, these leaders are still staking the safety of their assets on disks and tape. Still settling for the delays in retrieving physical backups, still paying the costs for ever-increasing data center space. Still willing to suffer through the struggles of long recovery windows and sacrifice lost sales to downtime. Here’s the thing. Just as doing business in the cloud is the new normal, so is 24/7/365 uptime. Once an hour of outage was understandable, if inconvenient. Now it can make the news if your brand is big enough – and invite disdain from customers who expect unrelenting uptime from all companies, including small businesses. When physical backups can’t be retrieved quickly, or they haven’t been tested recently, users feel it. And often they turn to a more reliable competitor who’s invested in a more sophisticated BDR system.

That’s why more and more teams are turning to cloud-based backup and disaster recovery. And that’s why we wrote an ebook on BDR in the cloud – to help curious or struggling teams decide if 2017 is the year they start their cloud journey.

You can read the book for more detail, but here are some of the topics we cover. We explain why the cloud offers the benefits it does, including flexibility, the opportunity to let go of tedious manual maintenance, testing and upgrades, and the greater resilience offered by offsite backups. We go over the elasticity and scalability the cloud is famous for, and how cloud solutions can save you money and make complex high availability solutions available for smaller businesses.

And for teams that are completely new to the cloud, we also go over the differences between public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).

Cloud-based solutions offer an array of possibilities. That’s why they’re so great, but it also means you need to do some homework before plunging in. Identifying critical apps and data, assessing your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and evaluating solutions in terms of speed, security, performance and efficiency are all important steps. Yes, we cover all of that too.

It’s an unfortunate fact that many teams don’t worry seriously about their backup and disaster recovery until they need it. A Ransomware attack has stolen their files – and they can’t access their backups in time, or find their backups aren’t usuable, forcing them to pay a horrific ransom. An epic storm floods their data center – and their BDR system only offers partial recovery, forcing them to make hard choices between which stakeholders can access their data. Cloud-based BDR offers many options for solving these challenges, which is probably why 75% of IT leaders currently use cloud-based solutions – and why our survey found 89% plan to increase their cloud-based disaster recovery.

Will you be one of them? Read our ebook . We’re happy to answer any questions you might have about which cloud options could work best for you.