Word is certainly getting around town that Cloud Computing is a phenomenon that requires some attention in your business. The question is not anymore whether you consider Cloud Computing but rather how best you utilise it to realise the benefits that it can bring to your organisation. In my opinion one of Cloud's heavyweight benefits is as an enabler of Disaster Recovery solutions. Many a times I have seen that organisations rely on a backup tape to be their saviour should the ultimate crisis cause them to lose access to their production environment. However the time (Recovery Time) it can take to restore this data after sourcing appropriate infrastructure to restore it on can be significant. Even if one is succesful after an arduous effort, data is as current as your last good backup (Recover Point) and one could be a week behind at this stage! The truth is that most businesses probably aren’t geared to match what their business defines as an acceptable Recovery Time Objective or Recovery Point Objective and there are ample stats to prove that most businesses do not survive if they suffer a complete loss of their production environment for an extended period of time (Gartner claim this to be 3 days!!!). But one can easily find themself between undesirable benefits...to mitigate the risk from an unlikely large scale disaster event may require a substantial investment in a DR environment similar to the production environment including all the Microsoft software...unless of course the license was purchased initially with Software Assurance and I can only assume that this is highly unlikely. But this is precisely where Cloud Computing can assist! Well for one an organisation does not need to acquire hardware for this objective and can have it ready and available on demand. Moreover if the backups are kept close to and in a format that allows for direct import into a Cloud providers environment then essentially this can assist in getting around the requirements for owning duplicate licenses for software just for DR purposes. So I vote strongly in favour for Cloud... if not for production then definitely for executing a DR strategy as it can result in significant savings whilst solving a diffficult yet critical business challenge
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