Cloud Computing Providers Offering Disaster Recovery Benefits

Today's enterprises with their networked business environment offers a workspace for revenue generation.

However, the competition in the environment makes its necessary for enterprises to expand their business

to regions beyond geographical boundaries. This calls for the top management to change their operational

strategies to fit in demand inflow from a larger customer base as well as to prepare the widely networked

enterprise to face the issues that challenges the global enterprise.

Operational strategies that need to be worked on includes besides others ability to provide access to the

corporate network irrespective of the region or location from where the end-user logs on. Further, the ability

to store large volumes of data so as to ensure protection of critical business information in case of a natural

or man-made disasters. The advent of cloud computing technology has helped in designing of cloud-based

data storage. With such storage solution being not only viable and inexpensive but also effective for business

continuity and disaster recovery, has been an increase in the growth of cloud computing providers.

Cloud computing as defined by Gartner is “a style of computing where massively scalable IT-related

capabilities are provided 'as a service' across the Internet to multiple external customers”. This features

enhanced flexibility through an on-demand service and wide network access. Moreover, with ability to pool

in resources, cloud computing service is offered either as software-as-a-service, Infrastructure-as-a-service or

Platform-as-a-service at the data centers and are deployed through private, public or hybrid cloud. The

growth of cloud computing offers enterprise a more efficient method to deliver continuous and reliable IT

services to end-users.

Cloud computing offers end-users both long-term and short term benefits. However, with virtualization

being the key feature that most end-users look forward to, the modern day cloud computing providers offers

their clients utility computing or pay-per use model. This model with its end-to-end architecture can

leverage on next generation technologies. Further, while offering customized solutions, they tend to align

the IT infrastructure costs with revenue to provide enterprises short term benefits. The virtual environment

offering self-provision servers, storage infrastructure and real-time access to the network resources provides

a secure connection while reducing the need for firewalls.

The long term benefits cloud computing helps aligns the IT infrastructure costs with revenue and business

growth to provide the end-users with efficiency, cost-control and focus on information technology for better

business opportunities. The model of utility-computing has today become the preferred choice for the data

center providers. Further, with cloud technology providing a paradigm shift from the traditional systems, the

cloud computing providers offer low-cost disaster recovery services that fits both the small and medium

enterprises as well as large business establishments.