Everyone knows that a comprehensive disaster recovery plan stands to pay for itself – should you need to use it. But over the years, we’ve seen many businesses fail to make the necessary investments in time and money to create one. Some were lucky. Many were not.

Of course, critical systems for banks, finance, and healthcare had significant redundancies built into their IT architecture. After all, these organizations could afford complex solutions maintained by some of the most talented IT folks in the industry. But many firms simply could not afford or maintain the necessary skills on staff to support a true disaster recovery solution for key applications and IT systems.

The cloud changes everything

Cloud-based disaster recovery solutions extend robust DR capabilities to almost any organization, regardless of size, internal skill sets, or budget. So, you can forget about the costs and complexities of DR’s past; both Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS have solutions to help organizations develop a truly affordable and simple disaster recovery solution for IT applications and systems. These new cloud solutions offer the following benefits:

• Less Expensive – DR has become financially viable for even the SMB market, with server virtualization allowing for the simplification of DR strategies in the cloud. Both AWS and Azure will support the replication of virtualized environments to their infrastructure. This option has lowered the cost and complexity of supporting a DR environment.
• Easier to Use – Cloud disaster recovery services from Amazon and Microsoft come with many pre-built functions and align directly with existing technologies, making it easy to use and to deploy.
• Improved Efficiency – The entire process of migrating data and synchronizing data to a cloud disaster recovery solution is far easier task than it was with traditional, more complex solutions. These solutions employ easy to use migration tools and built in best practice features, along with automation and monitoring capabilities.
• Increased Flexibility – Most cloud-based DR solutions have a variety of options available – from the ability to support the replication of only key services to a full active-active configuration. Along with the pay-as-you-go approach to your consumption of services, this adds enormous flexibility to the overall solution.
• Improved Security – Let’s face it: the amount of investment that Microsoft and Amazon are putting into securing their datacenters, infrastructure, and core software components exceeds those of even the most secure enterprise organizations. They are hiring the best and brightest to work on these solutions, and you can benefit from their work by using their solutions. The cloud is very secure!

With all of these advantages, it’s time to take a closer look at what next-generation DR solutions can do for your business. Ask a Zones account executive to connect you with our cloud team today.

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