Leveraging DR for the Cloud

Many poeple predict that both backup&recovery and Disaster Recovery will be the killer service for public cloud providers over the next year. Many providers claim that public cloud services are more cost effective based on their pay per use and shared infrastructure model. Shared infrastructure costing models and pay per use have been around for many years. I can remember traveling to Sungard faciities 15 years around to test my companies recovery capability from tape.

Certainly most companies have evoleved today to test more frequently and not rely on backup & recovery for their most critical applications and instead are using some host or storage based replication technology with a recovery orchestration solution like VMware Site Recovery Manager. I'm not sure companies are willing to replicate their companies most mission critical application data to a pubic cloud provider without better security and data governance capabiities but it does seem to be an interesting next step in DR services evolution.

What are your opinions and experiences on current backup and DR public cloud services available today? Are the economics better? Is the data security capbilities good enough? I'd be interested to see some feedback from companies that have explored the public cloud options.