When hearing the words “Disaster Recovery” it is really easy to conjure images in our minds of utter catastrophes. Natural disasters come to mind – tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods. When it comes to protecting data and maintaining operations, it is easy to see how things like natural disasters could impact a company’s ability to protect data and maintain operations.

It used to be the case that disaster recovery was an implied part of the backup process. I say it was implied because the devil really is in the details. Most people would say they had a plan and could recover from an outage but few ever actually tested for the sake of proving the model. The presumption back in the early days was that you could always recover from tape and that if your data was backed up then the ability to recover from a disaster was implied. Given the technologies at the time along with slow WAN connections it was always understood that the concept of disaster recovery using tape was at best going to be a “best effort” kind of recovery.

As you know, one of the things that nScaled does a bit differently from other cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers is we implement a Hybrid architecture, with an nScaled Local Cloud Appliance installed on the customer’s LAN providing business continuity and local backup, plus the nScaled Remote Cloud Data Centers providing the scale-up / scale-out elastic capacity for backup, failover and test/dev.

You’d think a cloud IaaS provider like nScaled would hate to see a sentiment like, “Infrastructure does not differentiate us in any way,” coming from the lips of a CIO. But quite the opposite – it’s why we’re here. When a business is ready to admit this to itself, they’re ready for our services.