Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery Woes In the Financial Sector
Many companies today go with traditional backup and disaster-recovery solutions, overlooking the fact that cloud computing and device virtualization have far more to offer. Natural and man-made disasters from political turmoil in the Middle East to the tragic tsunami that hit Japan have had the effect of making businesses rethink their backup and disaster-recovery strategies. However, studies indicate that many of the world’s largest corporations are still woefully lacking in backup and disaster recovery, and that this is especially true of many financial services businesses in the United States.
United States financial institutions particularly vulnerable
The fact that data processing and acquisition is an essential aspect of financial services makes this lack of preparedness particularly worrying. Managing billions of contracts and tens of thousands of credit card transactions per second, the world’s largest banks rely on a strong network and computing infrastructure. This reliance on stable data centers will only increase due to the rise of online banking and accompanying security risks.
Yet the 2012 Disaster Recovery Index’ findings make worrying reading for customers, indicating that only 35% of financial institutions in the United States are confident their IT departments can execute effective disaster recovery operations. Furthermore, only about 30% have confidence of a quick recovery from system downtime. Nearly half of the surveyed financial service providers indicated that system downtime cost them more than a quarter of a million dollars every year!
With data recovery playing such a critical role in the financial sector, why are more companies not making sure of protection from a possible disaster? IT managers indicate this problem stems from a lack of resources and lack of support from management. The complexity of these technologies can also be an issue. The unique combination of the need for the highest possible security, the need for speed, and the large-scale operations being carried out, does not translate well in terms of infrastructure. This often stems from an incomplete adoption of new technologies and a lack of consolidation of existing infrastructure into optimized, manageable units.
The largest financial firms require a complex infrastructure that needs to integrate physical platforms with private and public clouds, as well as physical and virtual devices. Establishing a backup and disaster recovery solution that encompasses all of a firm’s infrastructure is both expensive and complex. More than three quarters of financial firms surveyed in the 2012 Disaster Recovery Index indicated there is currently a lack of a comprehensive solution to integrate all of these platforms into a single, manageable, and affordable disaster recovery strategy. Confusion and costly management errors are increasingly commonplace in dealing with multiple vendors managing multiple platforms. However, recent cloud computing advances indicate that a move to a strategy based mostly on cloud can help solve many of these problems, saving both money and effort in the long term.
Cloud backup and disaster recovery
Although cloud computing has an inherent advantage in ensuring data is always accessible and more resilient against disasters, it is also important to backup virtual data. With cloud offering such backup solutions, more companies are starting to adopt a remote backup service for their most crucial data. In fact, data migration to the cloud can reduce IT operating costs significantly as well as helping backup and disaster recovery operations.
Blindly adopting the latest cloud and device virtualization innovations may not always be the best option from a backup and data recovery standpoint. While the cloud itself offers greater advantages in these matters, it is the unwieldy combination of physical platforms and multiple virtual platforms that makes backup and data recovery significantly more difficult. Because of this, a mistake financial companies have made is simply adding new technologies to their existing strategy without proper prior planning of infrastructure. To avoid the confusion and high costs that result from this, a careful strategy for IT infrastructure and implementation should be laid out in order to optimize the adoption of a new computing technology.
An equally important aspect of course is security. Prior to disaster recovery, businesses need to make sure that the security set up is reliable and effective. What are some of the attributes of security? Visit GMO Cloud’s Security page and see how much value is put into this aspect of the business.
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About the Guest Author:
Nida Rasheed is a freelance writer and owner of an outsourcing company, Nida often finds herself wanting to write about the subjects that are closest to her heart. She lives in Islamabad, Pakistan and can be found on Twitter @nidarasheed.
