CW+ Premium Content/Computer Weekly

Only the luckiest IT professionals will go through their careers without experiencing a major systems failure, outage or other incident that forces them to invoke a disaster recovery (DR) plan. According to Gartner’s 2017 Security and Risk Survey, 80% of IT leaders experienced such an incident in the past two years. As businesses become less tolerant of outages and demand quicker recovery times, firms small and large have increased spend on disaster recovery and business continuity – and much of that spend is moving to cloud disaster recovery, with 23% of companies now saying the cloud is their preferred DR location. Organisations often already use cloud-based archiving or cloud-based backup and recovery services. These might be dedicated services, bundled with existing backup software, or set up by local IT teams with generic, public cloud storage. However, true disaster recovery goes beyond backup and archiving. In a DR scenario, the cloud environment needs to host the operating system, application stack and data. Typically, ...