Feature: Shedding risk

Users eye cloud for storage and disaster recovery

Disaster recovery is becoming one of the most vibrant areas of IT investment for local users, as many small to mid-sized businesses shift away from backup to business continuity. Effective disaster recovery and backup technologies have started to migrate down the food chain, from government and large enterprises to small and mid-sized businesses, bringing the cost down with them.

While disaster recovery systems have been part of the business plan for large enterprises and the government sector for some time now, smaller and medium-sized organisations are becoming aware how many of their critical business processes are reliant on technology, says Arron Patterson, CTO for EMC New Zealand and country manager for EMC Global Services.

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See also: NZTE revamps storage, looks to SaaS, iSCSI

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“They are beginning to understand the importance of having disaster recovery and business continuity in place, but those who are actually achieving those goals are still in minority,” he says.

Some New Zealand businesses are still struggling to translate their business risk into dollars and build risk cases around their infrastructure, says Patterson.

Traditionally, EMC has been strong in the high-end, providing government departments and banks with solid business continuity systems, but recently the company has started driving that functionality right down to the smallest, cheapest arrays it provides, such as the Clariion AX4 range. This means you can get similar functionality for US$30,000 to $50,000 as you would have for $1 million a few years back, says Patterson.

Smaller organisations are now able to leverage the same solutions as high-end customers, says Adrian De Luca, director of pre-sales and solutions for Hitachi Data Systems in Australia and New Zealand. Hitachi is also seeing greater uptake from small to medium enterprises as the cost of business continuity has come down.

Smaller companies look to the cloud
Looking ahead, the small to mid-sized business sector is a strong growth area for EMC, says Patterson. The maturity of the systems has made them much simpler to use, provision and maintain, he says. But SMBs are also turning to cloud services, mainly for the simple pay-as-you-go approach and easy scalability and management they offer.

For Auckland-based IT services provider Canary Data Solutions, the solution is a combination of local secondary backup, off-site tape rotation and online backup and recovery services. Canary, a streamlined company with 11 staff, needed a cost-efficient disaster recovery system, without losing data. Company director Michael Clist decided to use Mozy’s online pay-as-you-go model as part of the backup strategy because it is “set-and-forget hassle free”, he says. There are no setup fees, no need to purchase hardware and it requires very little management. The service lets users manage multi-user environments and monitor and schedule automatic backups from a web-based admin console.