Summary
Historically, disaster recovery (DR) preparedness required substantial time and financial investment. For many, DR was out of reach, and for others, it was a burdensome task that often felt like an expensive insurance policy. Today, cloud-based DR is poised to shake up legacy approaches and offer frustrated infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals a great alternative. Instead of enterprises buying resources in case of a disaster, cloud computing and its pay-per-use pricing model allows them to pay for long-term data storage while only paying for servers if they have a need to spin them up for testing or in the event of a disaster. This provides significant cost reduction and removes several barriers to entry for many firms looking for faster recovery than what they can receive from tape. This report explores the use cases for DR in the cloud, the different models and providers today, and the benefits and risks of this approach.