DRaaS - The Easy Cloud Sale?

When speaking to people who sell Cloud Solutions I often ask where they get the most traction. Their answer is invariably the same - Disaster Recovery. Everyone needs disaster recovery, but it's always seen as a blackhole expense.

It's kind of like insurane, when you're paying the premium you wonder why you even bother and when you're relying on the payout your thankful that you have it.

It should be simple - it's data you don't need access to most of the time and it takes up a lot of sapce. Plus no one likes doing boring tape backups and automated backups can fail. And if someone forgets to do the backup you're in a lot of trouble. Why not offload that risk onto a 3rd party?

However, in speaking to a security expert I found out that DR is often a weak IT security point for a lot of enterprises. While companies make heaps of strides to secure 'current' data, virtually no effort is made to provide the same security to their 'recovery' data. So if there are so many concerns out there about how 'secure' cloud technology is, why is DR such an easy sale?

Further this article in the SMH discusses the legal implications of storing your data overseas - http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/cloud/is-it-legal-to-send-your-data-overseas-20111011-1lic0.html

Australian data laws seem inadaquetly prepared to deal with the sudden onset of Infrastructure and Storage solutions in the cloud. Especially when many large companies have their datacentres in the likes of Singapore, do many companies even know where their data is stored?

All this begs the question again, why do CIOs seem so accepting of putting their DR 'in the cloud'?