As the weather begins to turn colder and the snow and ice of winter starts to creep closer, it’s important for enterprises to think about their disaster recovery solutions before severe weather and downed power lines cause serious network outages. Last year’s polar vortex brought with it record snowfalls and massive disruptions, leaving people without power for days at a time. Modern businesses can’t afford to be offline for even a few hours, let alone days. This is where a cloud disaster recovery solution comes in. By hosting duplicate information in the cloud, organizations can still make the necessary networks and systems available even if their primary facility is experiencing downtime. Cloud-based disaster recovery solutions are useful to companies of all sizes, and capacity can easily be scaled up or down to meet an organization’s changing needs.

There are a variety of cloud-based technologies that can assist businesses in their disaster recovery operations. Cloud storage services have made great advances in recent years, allowing enterprises to duplicate sensitive data, control multitenancy operations and improve the speed of site-to-site replication. Virtualization is also a helpful tool for companies looking to enhance a disaster recovery solution. Through the use of virtualization, organizations are able to share, replicate and back up sensitive data, which can span global data centers if necessary.

Utilizing third-party DR services
Disaster recovery-as-a-service is another option available to companies, in which a cloud service provider will maintain and operate an enterprise DR solution. This option, along with other types of cloud-based disaster recovery services, is extremely cost-effective. Instead of organizations having to invest heavily in hardware and maintenance of a private data center, information is stored in the cloud and maintained by a third-party provider. Hosting disaster recovery operations in the cloud also enables enterprises to frequently test their backup systems without disrupting regular business processes, ensuring backup operations will work properly when they are needed.

Despite the increasing use of cloud services among enterprise clients, some organizations still have concerns about information security in the cloud. However, the cloud is actually one of the safer places a company could store its data. Cloud service providers treat security as one of their core competencies, and are tasked solely with maintaining and securing the data they host. Any organization that keeps its information in house will not be as prepared to defend against a cyberattack as a provider that has data protection as a main focus.