Cloud DR is as much about trust as it is about cost savings.

A few weeks ago I had an email exchange with an exec at a semiconductor company that had just deployed Cloud DR on AWS, replacing a dedicated facility in another state. As I asked him about the project I expected to hear about the reported $100k in capex savings. Instead of talking about their savings, he focused on the heightened trust the team gained with hybrid cloud automation:

“IT was spending significant portion of its budget and labor resources on a dedicated disaster recovery site in another state. Due to limited staffing and low tolerance for downtime, these disaster recovery systems were seldom fully tested. We were paying a lot for an infrastructure that would only provide benefits in the unlikely event of a major disaster, and still gave little confidence that the DR system would actually work when needed.” – Senior Director – IT, Leading Semiconductor Company

The automation of testing and failover meant that his team could adopt a regular testing plan, something unfeasible with their previous traditional disaster recovery deployment. Automation versus extensive manual processes meant that the environment could be easily tested on a regular basis. Something uncommon for most organizations, especially those with checklist DR (DR environments deployed but rarely tested).

That notion of trust was recently echoed by another CloudVelox customer who referred to cloud DR as being “rock solid.” You can watch the 78 second video on our cloud DR blog.

Trusting Surgery to the Surgeons

Asheville’s CIO Jonathan Feldman was recently interviewed by Next City; he talked about the need for cities to trust the cloud for security. The following is from Why Asheville’s CIO Trusts the Cloud with His City:

“He says that while some IT guys have an emotional response to outsourcing systems (“We don’t trust the cloud, because it’s not us”), he thinks the cloud is the future for cities. Just as it makes more sense to go to the surgeon who’s done 150 similar operations, “you want a really experienced person doing your security. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, they get attacked every day and they’re good at it.” – NextCity, Jan 29, 2015

A year ago that might have been a provocative statement, yet despite the surge in cloud adoption most of the recent high profile hacks have been targeting data behind firewalls in privately-owned data centers and retail locations. This also came out last night when Mark Hurd was interviewed by Mark Anderson at the SNS Predictions event in San Francisco.

So the core driver of a cloud DR deployment may indeed be as much about enhanced trust as cost savings…