Real Cloud Disaster Recovery & Beyond

There’s a good piece over at TechTarget today about disaster recovery in the cloud, a subject near and dear to our hearts at nScaled.

The writer, Joseph Foran, does a great job untangling some of the confusion about traditional offsite disaster recovery and DR in the cloud. The main issue that Foran addresses is how the use of virtualization by the DR service provider makes for a true cloud solution. The multi-tenancy and elasticity that virtualization provide drastically change the economics of DR for the provider and the customer. Careful over-provisioning lets the DR provider offer high, enterprise grade  SLAs for RPO and RTO at prices a fraction of what the traditional offsite disaster recovery providers can offer.

Foran also touches on the on-premises device that captures data, stores it, and replicates it to the cloud data center. This a key part of true hybrid cloud solution. If the on-prem appliance also uses virtualization, and is seamlessly and securely connected to the remote cloud data centers, via VPN or MPLS, then the DR solution is a real hybrid cloud solution, with all the scalability, security and recoverability that businesses need. The appliance gives the customer the ability to recover locally very quickly in the event of a single-server failure.

Beyond the scope of Foran’s story is this: we’ve learned that for many of our customers, DR-in-the-cloud is a prelude to moving entirely to the cloud. These companies needed to implement DR, and they chose nScaled for our hybrid technology, service agreement and support. But they’re also testing us, to see just how good we are at running cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), with an eye towards eventually getting out of the data center business themselves.

This trend has emerged in the last year or two and is gaining momentum from what we can see. It makes sense because it solves a high priority problem that the customers has today while letting the customer test us without putting their business at risk. We think this is the migration path that many companies will take on their way to the cloud.