New models present a compelling alternative for business continuity The cloud is pretty much a win-win when it comes to business continuity. First, a cloud service structurally is a mesh of redundant resources scattered across the globe. If one resource should become unavailable, requests re-route to another available site. So from a high-availability standpoint, everyone benefits. That’s why classes of “as a service” models are emerging for backup and recovery. Backup as a service (BaaS) and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) resonate particularly well with smaller, growing businesses that may not have the budgets for the equipment and real estate required to provide hot, warm, or even cold backup facilities and disaster recovery sites. The cloud itself becomes “the other site” – and you only pay for the “facilities” when you use them because of the cloud’s inherent usage-based pricing model. The global DRaaS market is forecast to grow by 36 percent annually from 2014 to 2022, according to Transparency Market Research. Cloud-based backup and DR makes it easy to retrieve files and application data if your data center or individual servers become unavailable. Using the cloud alleviates the threat of damage to or theft of a physical storage medium, and there’s no need to store disks and tape drives in a separate site. Cloud-based disaster recovery services eliminate the need for site-to-site replication – as well as the cost of additional DR infrastructure and real estate. Your IT assets are in the cloud and you can be anywhere across the globe and restore your files. An additional benefit is that BaaS and DRaaS tend to be computing-model-independent. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether you are running physical servers, virtual machines (VMs) or a mix of both. When they fail over to the cloud, the data and apps become available transparently, once you’ve configured them upfront to do so. And it’s common practice that your cloud service keeps in sync with your service provider’s software updates. So if you’re hosting your apps on-premise but use a cloud service for backup or replication, you don’t have to worry that the failover resources will be out of date. Related content brandpost Sponsored by Microsoft Proving the business value of big data By Preston Gralla Dec 10, 2015 3 mins Big Data Cloud Computing brandpost Sponsored by Microsoft Preparing for the workplace of the future By Preston Gralla Dec 04, 2015 3 mins Cloud Computing brandpost Sponsored by Microsoft Going beyond compliance in the cloud By John Dodge Nov 17, 2015 3 mins Cloud Computing brandpost Sponsored by Microsoft Productivity: Cloud’s Silver Lining? By Paul Gillin Nov 17, 2015 4 mins Cloud Computing Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe