Time to Put Backup and Recovery in the Cloud

When you think about all the time and effort that IT organizations put into backup and recovery, you can’t help but wonder why. Backup and recovery are applications where cloud computing makes a lot of sense, especially when you consider that client systems are getting more diverse by the minute.

A good example of what a backup and recovery service in the cloud should look like came this week in the form of a new service from Druva, a provider of backup and recovery software. Installed on the Amazon cloud computing service, Druva’s InSync Cloud offering automates much of the backup process and allows end users to recover their own files.

Druva InSync Cloud, based on a proprietary protocol that runs over TCP/IP, is designed to support laptop PCs, says Druva CEO Jaspreet Singh. What makes Druva really unique, says Singh, is that it comes with the ability to deduplicate data on the laptop before that data gets backed up across the network, and includes a built-in wide area network (WAN) optimization capability that reduces network bandwidth costs associated with transferring encrypted data.

In the event that an end user needs to recover a file, instead of having to call IT, says Singh, the end user can simply go to a portal to transfer the file in question back to their system. And best of all, says Singh, IT organizations can specify when backups occur so as to not only conserve network bandwidth during business hours, but also to not be dependent on end users having to actually remember to do anything. And Druva, says Singh, is willing to back all this talk up with service-level agreements (SLAs) that not only guarantee data availability but actual performance.

There are, of course, plenty of choices when it comes to backup and recovery in the cloud. And Druva does make a version of its software available for the enterprise. The only real question is why would you allocate precious internal IT resources to a task that not only takes up a lot of time and effort, but also has questionable business value? So when it comes to backup and recovery, it’s starting to look like the time for internal IT to get out of this business is finally upon us.