Security and availability have been prevalent concerns for cloud users, but the buyer’s market may not be as pessimistic as some experts seem to think. A recent survey by TwinStrata revealed positive opinions in several areas related to cloud storage solutions.
Disaster recovery is becoming an increasingly common use for the cloud, and the often-cited advantage is that utilizing third-party services puts backup data in a geographically distant location from primary storage. However, TwinStrata analysts found that 80 percent of cloud users feel the technology also enables faster time-to-recovery. The majority said data housed within a provider’s architecture could be recovered in less than 24 hours. In comparison, respondents said recovery would take more than a week using in-house infrastructure.
In addition, the survey confirmed the proliferation of cloud storage, finding that 90 percent of professionals polled already use or plan to adopt such an offering.
“Organizations require immediate solutions to problems such as rapidly escalating data growth and disaster recovery requirements,” the report stated. “The ability to implement cloud storage incrementally at first and to grow it over time, provides a unique opportunity for organizations to solve their immediate problems while testing the viability a long-term storage strategy.”
Customers still have a few concerns when it comes to disaster recovery in the cloud. As InfoWorld’s Matt Prigge noted, the existence of DR technology doesn’t mean that it’s functional. As a result, cloud buyers are likely to ask for assurances that the architecture is tested regularly and that agreements regarding recovery time can be met. Testing may also reveal problems in the recovery process that are better fixed outside of an actual disaster, which means cloud providers also stand to benefit from addressing this concern.
