Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery Woes In the Financial Sector

Many companies today choose to go with traditional backup and disaster recovery solutions, overlooking the fact that cloud computing and device virtualization have far more to offer. The many recent natural and man-made disasters in recent years – from the 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 behind when it comes to backup and disaster recovery; this is especially true of many financial services businesses in the United States. United States financial institutions are particularly vulnerable to disasters and system downtime 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 in order to carry out their business. This reliance on stable data centers will only increase due to the rise of online banking and the security risks that come with it. Customers demand financial security from their transactions and a possible disaster could be critical to a financial institution's operations. Therefore, the 2012 Disaster Recovery Index' findings are worrying, indicating that only 35% of financial institutions in the United States are confident that their IT departments can execute effective disaster recovery operations and that only about 30% have confidence of a quick recovery from system downtime. These are not hypotheticals: 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, it is worrying that more companies are not making sure that they are protected from a possible disaster. Many IT managers have indicated that this problem comes from a combination of lack of resources and a 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 for most of the data that is being handled, the need for speed, and the large-scale operations being carried out do 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 an expensive and complex matter. More than three quarters of the financial firms surveyed in the 2012 Disaster Recovery Index indicated that there is currently a lack of a comprehensive solution that integrates 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 in an effort to manage multiple platforms. However, cloud computing advances in recent years indicate that a move to a strategy based mostly on cloud computing can help solve many of these problems and save money and effort in the long term. Cloud computing and backup and disaster recovery strategies Although cloud computing has an inherent advantage in ensuring that data is always accessible and more resilient against disasters, it is also important to backup virtual data. The cloud also offers backup solutions and 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 become easier to handle. It is important to understand that 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, one of the mistakes that financial companies have made is simply adding new technologies to their existing strategy without the proper previous 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.

Be Part of Our Cloud Conversation

Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.   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.