In survey after survey, we find Canadian enterprises are lagging in the adoption of cloud computing. And the primary concern that makes them hesitant to adopt cloud computing is security issues.
In fact, with best security practices applied, the cloud is as secure as an on-premise data centre. What’s more, a cloud solution offers scalability and redundancy that would be far more expensive to incorporate into an on-prem solution.
1:00PM to 2:00PM ET
Disaster Recovery and Business Resumption are on the minds of CIOs of companies of all sizes. Companies can no longer afford service interruptions. Plus, the potential of the cloud to offer a realistic and affordable backup and recovery service is compelling.
Today’s enterprise simply cannot run on an architecture that doesn’t provide for disaster recovery and business continuity strategies. Downtime can be measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour.
At the same time, duplicating data stores in discrete geographic locations, paying the real estate costs of data centre facilities, and duplicating maintenance staff is an expensive proposition.
Enter the secure cloud, where managed services allow enterprises to address the issues that challenge a disaster recovery strategy.
- Redundancy. The core of a disaster recovery (DR) strategy is replication of data and processes in the event that the primary system fails. Rather than having to rebuild a live copy of the system, having an up-to-date copy can help put systems back online in minutes or hours, not days. And that’s critical as so much more consumer and business-to-business commerce takes place online.
- Scalability. Should a DR event demand more compute capacity, a cloud-based architecture can quickly scale to accommodate demand, and at a “per-cycle” cost, rather than forcing the purchase and configuration of more hardware and software.
- Portability. A key principle of a disaster recovery strategy is that mirrored systems must exist in discrete locations. A backup data centre is no use if it’s in the same basement where the primary system was knocked out by a flood. Cloud environments allow replication of key systems across a network that could be city-wide, nation-wide, or even transnational. Moreover, to be even more bulletproof, systems can be remodeled in a tertiary site should the primary site go down—backup for the backup.
- Automation. Cloud environments can be designed to autonomously respond to various conditions. They can respond to increases in demand; they can detect when primary processing should be shifted from one system to another; they can ensure that the most time-sensitive data and applications are available on a DR site to ensure the minimum of information and transactional data is lost.
Join us for the seminar Disaster Recovery – Can we Really Trust the Cloud? On Thursday, Oct. 15, at 1:00 PM to learn how a cloud architecture can support an effective and cost-efficient disaster recovery and business continuity strategy.
