How Does Cloud Backup and Recovery Work?

By Joshua Darrin
AIS Network Director of Operations

Replicating your entire infrastructure to a remote, disaster resilient location designed to be “always on” is not nearly as difficult as it may have been just five years ago.

Welcome the cloud – designed to be there when you need it most.

The combination of the cloud and the right backup and/or disaster recovery solution breaks the old school incremental and full backup model and replaces it with continuous data protection.

Continuous data protection takes frequent snapshots of your systems so your backups always run – 24/7/365.

In the old days, recovery meant traveling to a remote site to retrieve tapes, having hardware on standby or ordering new and then beginning the cumbersome and often unreliable process of restoring data. In the cloud, this has all been replaced with one idea – virtualization.

Recovery in the cloud requires no travel, no extra hardware and it offers extreme levels of reliability.

Should a disaster occur, the right cloud solution allows the continuously backed up systems to be restored as virtual machines. Imagine a world where your entire infrastructure could be physically lost and within hours be up and running again in the cloud. That time has arrived.

How does it work?

Cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions allow the backups to be recovered into a virtualized environment as virtual servers. Virtual servers are hardware independent, meaning your operating system, applications and data all come alive exactly as they were on the original hardware. Once virtualized, machines can be easily moved between data centers quickly.

The right cloud solution for backup and disaster recovery offers amazing protection for your infrastructure by minimizing data loss and providing rapid and flexible recovery models. The days of tape, like the days of VHS, have passed us by and the cloud is quickly becoming the new baseline for protecting your infrastructure.