– Jackie Yuen, senior product manager, ITO Business, New Business Division, NTT Com Asia (www.ntt.com.hk), says:

In the wake of the recent natural disasters that have occurred in Asia and around the world, CIOs are scrambling to ensure that their companies are prepared when disaster strikes. Most companies agree that a sudden unexpected outage can wreak major damage in terms of compromised data or lost business, yet many do not have in place adequate disaster recovery (DR) plans, equipment and infrastructure to support a rapid and effective response

In addition, DR has traditionally been expensive and complex – comprising entire duplicate IT infrastructure at two or more different sites, in addition to all the hands-on systems and storage management that accompanies it. The extensive resources and implementation time needed has discouraged many enterprises from investing in DR planning and processes.

With the recent emergence of virtualization and cloud technologies, DR is now available through the cloud and it is transforming the way businesses carry out continuity planning and deployment. Many enterprises highly value the unparalleled agility, scalability and cost-effectiveness brought by NTT Com Asia EnterpriseCloud’s “pay-as-you-go” model and “elastic scaling” features, but still consider that security, reliability and service quality are top factors.

Efficiency, Deployment and Recovery Time:

  • Traditional DR solution may involve hardware procurement and installation which may take months to implement. Deployment of cloud-based DR solution can be completed within days.
  • In the event of disaster, the recovery time is shortened to mere minutes to turn on the “standby” resources which would otherwise take hours or days in the case of traditional DR, thus meeting faster Recovery Time Objectives.

Agility:

  • Traditional DR solutions require enterprises to duplicate data or even the entire IT infrastructure in two more remote physical data centres.
  • With cloud-based DR, enterprises can operate a secondary DR site in the cloud using on demand compute resources to meet varying conditions and emergency levels.

Cost-effectiveness and Pricing Model:

  • Conventional DR would involve duplication of hardware, software and hosting that would cost up to 100% of the cost of primary site.
  • With the “pay-as-you-go” pricing model of cloud-based DR solution, enterprises can pay only for the compute resources when used, which makes it very cost-effective to maintain and bring as much as 60% cost savings as compared to conventional DR.
  • For instance, the CAPEX investment of conventional DR could cost a million dollars and the deployment typically ranges from tens to hundreds of thousand dollars per month whereas cloud-based DR solutions generally cost a fraction of that, at several thousand to tens of thousand dollars.

IT Complexity:

  • Small enterprises without the resources to maintain a physical backup site can now have that option of using a fraction of the traditional DR costs with no upfront investment. These additional compute resources are activated on-demand and only storage that hold the data will be charged on normal basis which significantly cuts down their stand-by costs.

The advantages of using cloud DR services for large enterprises who already operate their own primary and second backup sites are not only on the time and resources being reduced, but the cost savings and operational efficiency gained by moving some or all of their DR infrastructure into the cloud. Through the online management portal, the additional compute resources can be provisioned, offering simplified management all via one interface.

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