4 tech trends in disaster recovery

A subset of business continuity (BC), and like BC, disaster recovery (DR)'s being influenced by some of the key trends in the IT industry. Foremost among these are: cloud services,server and desktop virtualization, the proliferation of mobile devices in the workforce,and the growing popularity of social networking as a business tool.

These trends are forcing many organizations to rethink how they plan, test and execute their DR strategies. CSO previously looked at how these trends are specifically affecting IT business continuity; as with BC, much of the impact they are having on DR is for the better.

Still, IT and security executives need to consider how these developments can best be leveraged so that they improve, rather than complicate, DR efforts.

Here's a look at how these four trends are having an impact on IT disaster recovery.

Cloud services
As organizations use more internal and external cloud services, they're finding that these resources can become part of a disaster recovery strategy.

Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., provides numerous private cloud services to internal users and customers. It also hosts services for 17 school districts and large enterprise clients.

"The cloud configuration allows us to perform software upgrades across the multiple tenant systems quickly, easily and without disruptions," said Bill Thirsk, vice president of IT and CIO at the college.

"Because our storage is virtualized, we can replicate data across SANS [storage-area networks] that we have placed strategically on our campus in numerous locations and in our datacenter [in Syracuse, N.Y.] A loss of a SAN means only that production operations switches over to another."

Because Marist can perform server-level backups across partitions, it can move data from one server platform to another should an event occur, Thirsksaid.

There's big potential value in cloud-based DR services, said Rachel Dines, senior analyst, Infrastructure & Operations, at Forrester Research.

To date, adoption of these offerings has been low, Dines said, "but there is a huge amount of interest and planning going on at end-user companies. Instead of buying resources in case of a disaster, cloud computing and its pay-per-use pricing model allows companies to pay for long-term data storage while only paying for servers if they have a need to spin them up for a disaster or test."

Cloud-based DR has the potential to give companies lower costs yet faster recovery, with easier testing and more flexible contracts, Dines said.

In a 2012 report from Forrester, the firm said cloud-based DR threatens to shake legacy approaches and offer a viable alternative to organizations that previously couldn't afford to implement disaster recovery or found it to be a burdensome task.

Perhaps the biggest downside to the cloud from the standpoint of DR is concern surrounding security and privacy management.

"You still see with some major events, such as the lightning strike in Dublin [in 2011] that took out the cloud services of Amazon and Microsoft, that there can be some temporary loss of service," said John Morency, research vice president at research firm Gartner. "The cloud shouldn't be considered 100% foolproof. If organizations do need that 100% availability guaranteed they need to put some serious thought into what they need to develop for contingencies."