In this blog, we are diving straight into our list of reasons to move your IT disaster recovery to the cloud. Here we go…

Choice and flexibility

• There are different cloud choices depending on what you need, be it public clouds for non-sensitive data to private clouds for mission critical business data.
• The cloud delivers scalability, so your expenditure is balanced overtime, costing you more at peak times and less at quiet times. It also means your disaster recovery plans and other systems can grow as your business grows.

Money and manpower

• You don’t need to invest in capital expenditure for you own servers and hardware, instead the cloud supports operational expenditure. That means you have reduced up-front costs and reliable budgeting.
• Embracing the cloud can free up your staff because there’s no need for them to check backups or monitor and maintain hardware as the responsibility sits with your cloud services provider.
• Data can be cost-effectively sorted over long periods of time.
• The cloud reduces the risk of a disaster occurring in the first place and makes the response to it easier and cheaper.
• You don’t need a secondary site because the cloud can eliminate the need to replicate your production system in full at a secondary company managed data centre. In other words, disaster recovery is available on demand in the cloud.

Efficiency and accuracy

• You can analyse backed up data to understand risks and challenges around dormant data, storage growth and data classification.
• Collaboration is easier because documents can be shared across multiple locations and time zones.
• The cloud can improve upon and solve issues that come with old business processes and on-premise solutions.
• Data storage is more efficient thanks to de-duplication technologies
• Cloud based systems can streamline the archival process, not only reducing costs but human error as well.
• The cloud boasts no downtime
• You can centralise your data management and eliminate separate legacy systems and workflows.
• A cloud storage model can increase visibility into existing business data which can then be used to deliver extra business value.

Security & storage

• Your business data is no longer tied to down to a particular device or set of devices, improving security and giving you on-demand access.
• Your data can be fully encrypted both in transit and at rest.
• Replicated virtual machines can be pushed to any global location, making spin-up in the event of a disaster very efficient. This also reduces system downtime to a matter of minutes, significantly reducing any impact on your business productivity.
• Cloud-based systems allow businesses to store replicated virtual machines to multiple storage regions for even greater protection and redundancy.
• Data in the cloud is always at hand for data mining and any legal or compliance needs.
• There’s no need for separate Test/Dev systems as you can repurpose available virtual machines.
• You don’t need a backup process to ensure you can restore the latest files due to an outage if you’re using the cloud.