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All tied up

Cloud has the power to untangle the backup, business continuity and disaster recovery knot.

Stergios Saltas
By Stergios Saltas, MD of Striata SA.
Johannesburg, 24 Jun 2016

For many years, companies have spent an enormous amount of time and money on "what if" protection. The most expensive items have historically been disaster recovery (DR), business continuity (BC) and backup processes - essential capabilities for all companies. Service disruption, no matter how short, can damage a company's reputation, ruin client relationships and play havoc in operational departments until full functionality is restored.

As a process, running backups and ensuring business continuity requires detailed planning, processing, testing and verifying. Each of these steps comes at a cost in terms of human capital, software and hardware, plus the costs and time associated with replicating data and storing backups securely offsite. Some companies also have minimum requirements per region, which they must consider when designing a backup strategy.

Cloud computing has allowed companies to rethink many fundamental IT practices - backup, DR and BC being three of these that fit particularly well into a cloud architecture. Cloud-based computing provides a faster, more efficient and cost-effective alternative to onsite and offsite backup and DR. Cloud infrastructure allows for quick and accessible backups, making the recovery time far superior to that offered by traditional backup practices.

Precautionary measures

Typically, a company would have each of its live processes duplicated on alternative environments, so it could be "switched on" at any time. This requires its own set of processes to ensure the alternative environment will be functional when needed - including version control and DR simulations - which take up a lot of time and resources. In the cloud era, both primary and DR projects and their data can be stored offsite and still be available online.

This extends to document management in the cloud. Managing documents usually results in a large volume of data that has to be backed up and stored. A month's worth of data could run into a terabyte of storage space. This makes the backup process expensive, because you effectively need three times the capacity to cater for online, backup and testing, creating redundant hardware that can't be used for anything else.

Adopting a cloud-based document management system removes this storage and backup overhead. Documents are created and stored in the cloud - offsite and online - without any manual intervention or process required on the company's part. Documents are assigned a 'time of life' when they are created, and as they reach the end of that time, the provider will notify the company that the document is reaching the end of its retention period and can either be deleted or allocated an extended time of life and remain in the system.

Documents in symmetry

This is a much more cost-effective solution - companies don't have to invest in backup, DR and BC infrastructure, saving on capital expenditure. And because cloud works on a 'pay as you use' basis, when documents reach 'end of life', costs adjust accordingly and an equilibrium is reached between documents being created and those being purged.

Service disruption, no matter how short, can damage a company's reputation.

Documents have different compliance and privacy requirements based on their content, which means the DR and BC solution must also adhere to the relevant technical environment, policies and procedures. Having a cloud-based document storage and retrieval system (primary and backup) means legislative compliance becomes a factor in selecting the service provider, rather than an internal expertise requirement. Security, availability, time of life and destruction obligations become part of the selection criteria and are detailed in a service level agreement. Once the solution is in place, ongoing compliance-related monitoring and reporting is part of the service.

Adhering to industry standards such as ISO 27017 (cloud security) and PCI DSS can also be a factor in selecting a cloud service, especially for documents containing financial or medical information. To provide customers and stakeholders with the surety such a standard brings, is certainly a competitive advantage.

Moving document management to the cloud allows companies to leverage the expertise of the cloud provider, offloading the responsibility for DR and BC to a company whose core competency is the seamless transition between environments.

For IT departments, this means valuable skills and resources can be refocused from managing the backup, disaster recovery and business continuity process, to managing the engagement with specialist providers, and on delivering the right service to the business.

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