All organizations aim for greater efficiency in all aspects of their operations. In today’s world there is greater emphasis for speed of delivery, and lower costs. This is one of the reasons why many organizations have shifted their computing requirements to the cloud. To be efficient, an organization also needs to be reliable and somehow disaster-proof. It needs to have the ability to get back up and running after a disaster or disruption in the shortest time possible, and with minimal loss of data. This is where VMware DR cloud solutions come in, and it promises faster recovery times and much lower cost than onsite disaster recovery methods.
What Makes DR Cloud Solutions Better?
When an organization’s computing requirements are moved to the cloud, almost everything is done through virtual machines. Virtual machines are used to contain the operating systems and applications that the organization need for its operations. The same machines also contain software updates and data files. This makes it easier to scale cloud services and to replicate entire virtual servers. What makes it possible is the very nature of virtual servers which are really data, applications and operating systems bundled together in a cloud environment.
In the cloud, organizations do not have to deal with hardware – the cloud service providers take care of those. This makes it easy to move virtual servers and their contents from one place to the other safely. Whatever you need to backup d can be created in a very short time. As a bonus, data transfers are done more accurately and safely. Transferring entire virtual servers with all the software, software updates and data can be done in a snap – almost as easy as copy-paste operations. Very fast recovery times are possible as data is replicated from one storage area network (SAN) to another. When using physical computer servers for backup, the operating systems and applications need to be loaded onto them. Then all the loaded software needs to be updated up to the last configuration used. Only after that can data be restored.
Competition among cloud service providers is so strong that prices charged for services, including disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), have gone down sharply. It is now cost effective to use online digital backup of files and data. This has made the use of tape backup methods almost obsolete – very few organizations use them anymore.
The lower cost of backup and data recovery services in the cloud has made warm site disaster recovery affordable. A preventative warm site lets you preload operating systems and applications on virtual servers, ready to receive recovered data when disaster strikes. Even the cost of hot sites featuring live updates is considerably lower. This online site explains the differences between disaster recovery cold, warm, and hot sites.
Security has also improved a lot, with most companies using various types of encryption technologies and firewalls which meet or exceed industry standards.
There is a DR cloud solution for your company out there. All it takes is a consultation with one of many cloud service providers to start the ball rolling.