Today, most organizations have started to think about moving at least some resources to the public cloud. As the public cloud offered by the major vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google has matured, the confidence in utilizing these resources with business-critical systems has certainly grown among infrastructure professionals and CIOs alike. Public cloud has allowed organizations to be agile, mobile, and aggressive with turning up resources basically in any geographic location. Cloud is certainly a driving force in today’s design decisions with business-critical systems. What about data protection? How can organizations integrate public cloud in data protection solutions? What are the advantages to utilizing public cloud resources when it comes to data protection?
Advantages of Utilizing Public Cloud Resources
Before we look into the specifics of data protection, let’s take a step back and look at the general advantages organizations achieve by utilizing public cloud resources. Public cloud offers many advantages but let’s consider the following:
- Massively better resiliency and security
- Agility and scalability in Provisioning Resources
- Allows transition from capital expense to operational expense
- Business can place resources close to the needs of customers
There is no question that public cloud vendors are able to provide security and resiliency far surpassing what most organizations are able to achieve in private cloud datacenters of their own. Simply put, it requires a massive investment to create a facility that has physical security and redundancy both from a power perspective and a network perspective. For organizations to do this not only for one location but for many locations around the world, is not feasible. By utilizing public cloud resources, an organization is able to “piggy back” off the tremendous investment made by Amazon, Microsoft, or Google and have the same level of security and redundancy backing their business-critical systems.
Utilizing public cloud also allows organizations to be extremely agile. This agility comes from the ease and speed at which new servers or entire system infrastructures can be provisioned. This can be done without spec’ing out new servers, purchasing new servers, and waiting for those servers to ship, rack and stack, and software be installed. Organizations are effectively able to fast forward past the mundane aspect of the physical infrastructure and get right to building out powerful software systems. Additionally, organizations have hundreds of datacenters that can be accessed in all parts of the world, allowing workloads to be provisioned or moved very quickly. This is simply not possible without utilizing public cloud for most organizations. If there are not enough resources, public clouds simply let you spin up as many more resources as you need allowing organizations to scale easily and quickly.
As organizations provision infrastructure, there are always fiscal concerns that come into play. Utilizing the public cloud has allowed organizations to begin shifting from the huge capital investments that are required to provision or refresh an enterprise datacenter or subset of server and network infrastructure to an operational expense centric model. Public cloud is billed out by usage. So, the huge up-front cost of server infrastructure is replaced by hourly rates, allowing organizations to add this expenditure into operational expenses for a month/year. Often, this is a much more fiscally desirable model for many organizations.
Utilizing public cloud also allows organizations to place resources close to the needs of customers. As mentioned, the large public cloud vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have datacenters all over the world. Customers who use public cloud are able to tap into this geographic diversity and strategically place data closest to the needs of customers, no matter in which region they are located.
Integrate Public Cloud into Data Protection
The reasons mentioned above and others provide compelling reasons that organizations want to look into leveraging public cloud for storing data and powering their applications. One of the applications of public cloud that is proving to be extremely beneficial to organizations is utilizing the strengths that public cloud provides with data protection solutions.
Organizations are able to utilize the public cloud for very cost-effective disaster recovery needs. Building a dedicated datacenter for DR purposes is expensive and time consuming. By leveraging public cloud for DR purposes organizations can immediately take advantage of having a “datacenter” they can target for replication data, backup copies, and achieve geographic diversity.
Today’s modern data protection solutions are tightly integrating with public cloud vendors to provide options to utilize public cloud resources within the overall data protection strategy, all included in the solution “out of the box”. This allows organizations to have access to the best of both worlds when it comes to engineering a data protection strategy that is powerful, efficient, and agile.
Vembu BDR Suite allows organizations to take advantage of the cloud for DR purposes. With the click of a button Vembu BDR Suite gives organizations access to a “datacenter” to create an offsite copy of backup data.
Vembu BDR Suite Provides powerful integration to the public cloud for Offsite DR
Thoughts
Access to the cloud has allowed organizations today to be more agile than ever before. If they haven’t already, most organizations are looking to start moving production workloads to the public cloud. As discussed, moving to the public cloud holds many advantages for today’s organizations including resiliency and security, agility in provisioning resources, a shift to operational costs, and placing resources in the best location geographically for customers. All of the same advantages come into play when thinking about data protection solutions. By utilizing the cloud for disaster recovery, organizations can easily provision a “backup datacenter” or “DR facility” without any of the capital expenses or provisioning time to put those facilities in place. By utilizing modern data protection solutions such as Vembu BDR Suite, organizations can easily tap into these resources and build a powerful, scalable data protection architecture that is future proofed.
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