HOT TOPIC
With all the hype surrounding cloud services, it’s easy to see why this technology is fast becoming appealing to SMBs, says David Blackman, general manager, Northern Europe, Acronis.
Local backup and recovery software, for example, may allow you to recover from problems such as a mistakenly deleted file, or from a crash of a server or workstation. But that alone won’t protect you from the severe consequences of natural or manufactured disasters that involve the actual destruction of your local IT resources through fire, flood or theft. To survive those onslaughts, SMBs need total coverage, and that means investing in a complementary offsite strategy.
Unfortunately, a dedicated, offsite disaster recovery facility is an investment beyond the means of
most small and medium-size organizations. Relying on offsite tape archives may be cheaper, but can sink your business if they take days, sometimes weeks to mount and recover onto replacement systems. However, there are solutions coming soon from experienced vendors with a heritage in onsite backup who will offer a dedicated datacentre, without the dedicated datacentre’s high price.
IDC’s report also recognizes that many cloud services providers are working from traditional pricing strategies, offering little flexibility in their pricing or services. What is needed on a wide scale for cloud
services to truly take off is a shift towards a SaaS business model, which provides differentiation from providing simply compute and storage power.
Research from our customers shows that many SMBs are still trying to get to grips with best practice disaster recovery. While online backup technology may not be the panacea of disaster recovery, when it goes hand in hand with a solid physical backup and recovery process it certainly goes a long way towards offering cash strapped SMBs a much more robust and rounded data protection strategy which is more aligned to their true business requirements.’
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What is interesting is how cloud still divides an audience and therefore demonstrates just how the industry still needs to sharpen up its associated business messages, argues Nigel Tozer, Business Development Director, EMEA, CommVault.
Whilst some partners will roll their eyes at a mere mention of cloud, others are embracing the concept because when the customers start buying the services, they want to be in place and ready to provide hosted offerings; with all the opportunities for recurring revenue.
The overall sense is that IT is shifting from a CAPEX to OPEX model, perhaps heightened by the recession, but most certainly driven by the crossover of technical and economic analysis.
Businesses are considering the lessons recently learned and are still looking closely at IT expenditure, especially for storage.
Alternatives are being sought that make their business operations more agile.
This desire has been further buoyed by both the media and vendors alike, and whilst there are genuine cloud/hosting services that are already delivering on these promises, there are also some vendors loosely tagging ‘cloud’ to
existing products - which is where a lot of the confusion originates. I however would be shocked if IT directors failed to see through such rebranding exercises.
Forget the hype. Cloud is now a very real and pragmatic response as it can give a company what it needs today, along with the agility and flexibility to still drive business forward.
It is that dynamism which is rightly attracting most attention.
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SUMMER 10
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