Head to head: A call for backup

Sam Forbes

Managing director, 6YS

The recent floods have prompted an increase in the number of inquiries regarding cloud computing. As you would expect, some inquiries have come from flood affected businesses. But we have also seen an increase in general inquiries. While these haven’t been specifically addressed as inquiries relating to disaster recovery I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are seeing an uptick in interest.

Perhaps that’s not surprising given the media coverage and the number of cloud providers advertising assistance. I think what has really captured attention is coverage of businesses working in the cloud that has highlighted their ability to keep working through the crisis. A light bulb has gone off for some people where they are now thinking about business continuity instead of disaster recovery; that is, a shift from how to recover from an outage to avoiding one altogether.

The nature of this disaster really highlighted the issue of access and power. If your equipment is safe but you can’t access it because your office is unusable or doesn’t have power, you still face an outage. Perhaps not a critical outage but enough that it’s getting people to look around at options.

There are many factors a business considers in making the shift to a cloud environment. Businesses are not going to move to the cloud solely for the DR benefits. But the appeal of a service that doesn’t go down has certainly captured business attention

Ilkka Tales

Managing director, Anittel

There is a definite move towards cloud-based disaster recovery solutions. Both small and large clients see the benefit of automated, encrypted, off-site backups, but it tends to be part of a larger, integrated cloud-based offering.

Customers are seeing the benefits that WAN and cloud solutions can provide, particularly for improvements in mobility and productivity. The number of enquiries for cloud offerings has been particularly strong for us over the last two months, but I’m sure this is more to do with growing interest in the concept, coupled with strengthened awareness of Anittel in the marketplace.

What is changing is the recognition that, besides all the day to day operational benefits, the cloud has a role in disaster recovery too. There might have been some hesitancy in the past because companies of all sizes were sceptical about storing data off-site, but that attitude is definitely shifting.

Our recommendation in the past has been, for ultimate peace of mind, to use a combination of an on-site and cloud based solution, but we are seeing more customers moving to a cloud-only approach, because it’s easy to maintain and lower cost. It’s also becoming more viable with the increased functionality of cloud-based applications.

But the cloud will only ever be part of a full IT offering. In terms of disaster recovery, for larger clients we will always work on-site to take an image of servers then use an on-line solution to transfer new data and update versions.