The Service Continuity Evolution
The road ahead leads to the Cloud, hosted infrastructure and service continuity. With the disaster recovery plan in place, the next step for the enterprise is the private cloud, the enterprise's own secure cloud on the internet – and a Service Continuity Plan. Depending on budget choices the SCP may be internally managed, or call on a third party specialist, the ISP, or a Cloud Computing leader such as Amazon and its EC2 infrastructure. The deployment and operation of an IP network which guarantees continuity of service is no longer restricted to telecom operators and Fortune 500 enterprises. With real-time data replication, server virtualisation and automatic system recovery, small and medium businesses can deploy their own hosted backup systems. The cloud needn't be limited to business applications; VoIP, unified communications and context-dependant security services can all be delivered via the cloud.
Recovery over the Cloud
In an innovative move which shows the way forward Double-Take Software's workload backup solution can now be associated with the recovery application via the Amazon cloud. Every change in the target workload is securely replicated in real-time to a virtual platform hosted in the EC2 infrastructure. Should any incident impact the target server, the real-time replication ensures that no more than a few seconds of data is lost; with rapid system recovery the productivity hit is minimised. A full system image – data, applications and system configuration – is hosted in the cloud, accurately representing the status of the target system up to the moments prior to the incident.
“When needs and technologies mature, merging them delivers realistic opportunities to reduce costs. This makes the technology more affordable, putting it within reach of a broader market. And enterprises of all sizes are interested in cost reductions” says Sebastian Gas, managing director of Flowline, an integrator based in Lyon (France).
Recovery over the Cloud doesn't remove the need for the enterprise to ensure a backup platform is available, but operational costs only need to be paid while the backup system is in use. This means business applications can be restarted within minutes or hours, rather than the days it would take to select, order, pay for, and arrange delivery of new server hardware.
An SMB with limited resources but needing to deliver 24 hour, 7 days/week service levels can now look to the Cloud for a solution. Cloud-based services can deliver full restoration, on demand, with service continuity guarantees and unlimited resources. And the usage-based billing model means there's no need to hunt for a hosting provider when system recovery is necessary.
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Sustained Growth for On Demand Applications
The software market has been revolutionised by the SaaS model and on-demand provisioning. According to a study of 270 enterprises and 160 providers carried out by Markess International in Q1 2009, 61% already use or intend to use SaaS and/or On-demand solutions. 23%, on the other hand, don't have SaaS on the radar and 16% answered “don't know”. Typical deployments cover business communications, HR, CRM, and marketing campaigns. Looking forward, market growth between now and the end of 2010 is expected to be fastest in CRM, HR, sales management and enterprise content management. Storage and backup solutions should see 10% growth annually, according to Markess International.
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