Continuity Insights: What were the big breakthroughs and setbacks for Cloud in 2011?

Ziv Kedem: The centre of gravity of the data center is moving into virtualization and the Cloud. It’s symbolic that this year, for the first time, more than 50 percent of the world’s servers are virtual servers rather than physical servers.

That said, many organizations are reluctant to move their production applications to the Cloud — this migration is not moving as quickly as some people thought it would.

CI: What was the Cloud/DR buzz word of 2011?

ZK: Hypervisor-based replication, due in part to VMware embedding this technology into their site recovery manager. We also have a lot of customers asking us how to do this because they want to take advantage of the combination of virtualization and physical replication.

CI: How have perceptions surrounding cloud security changed during 2011? What impact did the Dropbox incidents have on people’s perceptions of Cloud security?

ZK: The Dropbox and Amazon incidents convinced some people that the Cloud is not something they should 100 percent jump to. Amazon was a very inexpensive way to get data onto the Cloud. I think it made some want to go to a better Cloud provider with better service level agreements (SLAs) and better security. People are starting to understand that there is a good reason to pay more for a premium Cloud service.

CI: How have technology advances in 2011 affected the level of service that cloud providers can guarantee?

ZK: The big change, not in technology per se, is the maturity of the Cloud providers. They are starting to learn what is expected of them, how to communicate SLAs back to their customers, what the cost of an outage is for their customers, etc.

CI: How does disaster recovery in the Cloud differ from tradition DR, in terms of RTOs and RPOs (performance) and cost?

ZK: There are some big advantages you get from the Cloud, especially for the recovery time objective (RTO). Because everything is virtualized in the Cloud you can test it better and you’re not as vulnerable to changes in the environment — you can get everything back online faster.

There’s not much difference for recovery point objective (RPO). The big difference is in cost.

If you use your recovery site 365 days a year then you have a real problem. Most companies would use it a few days a year for testing, but pay for it 365 days a year.

If you’ve already made a big investment in your infrastructure, it doesn’t make sense from a cost or risk perspective to rip it out and move into the Cloud. Instead, users can easily transition some [less critical] applications to the Cloud because the migration path is very easy.

CI: What are your predictions for 2012?

ZK: We’ve see this movement of DR to the Cloud and I think it will be one of the biggest trends of 2012. Many are reluctant to move production or critical applications to the Cloud, which is why disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is a great way for them to start using the Cloud. It can reduce complexity and allow them to start using the Cloud for important applications.

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