Most IT professionals correctly refer to the internal cloud as their virtualization project, and often roll their eyes when a vendor refers to it as a cloud.
Nevertheless, virtual infrastructures can benefit from the actual public cloud to augment what they are doing. The public cloud can help provide smaller businesses a place to send data for off-site backup storage, a place to recover in the event of a disaster, and even a place to move applications when peak loads have exceeded the capabilities of the internal data center. Let’s look at the possibilities.
1. Public Cloud As Off-Site Backup.
One of the earliest and most frequent uses of cloud storage is as a backup target. First, it was used to back up laptops and desktops, but now it is being used to protect physical and virtual servers. Using cloud storage creates an ideal separate location from the data center, and most providers have multiple geographically dispersed facilities as well. The farther your data is away from you the better protected it is from a regional disaster.
The challenge, though, for many virtual backup processes is that the use of cloud storage is not integrated directly into the virtual backup software. It has to be added on as an afterthought via some sort of gateway appliance. This separation reduces efficiency and increases complexity. As we will discuss in our upcoming webinar, “Using The Cloud To Solve the SMB VMware Backup Problem,” integration with the cloud is critical for virtualized backup applications going forward. It should be just another checkbox within the backup software.