4 top trends in the disaster recovery space

Disaster recovery (DR) is a subset of business continuity (BC), and like BC, it's being influenced by some of the key trends in the IT industry. Foremost among these are
cloud services, server and desktop virtualization,the proliferation of mobile devices in the workforce and the growing popularity of social networking as a business tool.

These trends are forcing many organizations to rethink how they plan, test and execute their DR strategies. CSO previously looked at how these trends are specifically affecting IT business continuity; as with BC, much of the impact they are having on DR is for the better. Still, IT and security executives need to consider how these developments can best be leveraged so that they improve, rather than complicate, DR efforts.

Here's a look at how these four trends are having an impact on IT disaster recovery.

Cloud Services

As organizations use more internal and external cloud services, they're finding that these resources can become part of a disaster recovery strategy.
Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., provides numerous private cloud services to internal users and customers. It also hosts services for 17 school districts and large enterprise clients.

"The cloud configuration allows us to perform software upgrades across the multiple tenant systems quickly, easily and without disruptions," says Bill Thirsk, vice president of IT and CIO at the college.

"Because our storage is virtualized, we can replicate data across SANS [storage-area networks] that we have placed strategically on our campus in numerous locations and in our data center [in Syracuse, N.Y.] A loss of a SAN means only that production operations switches over to another."

Because Marist can perform server-level backups across partitions, it can move data from one server platform to another should an event occur, Thirsk says.