Adoption of the cloud for mission critical business applications is accelerating. But, does it have to be “all or nothing”.

As stated in the post How to Evaluate Moving Legacy Mission-Critical Apps to the Cloud “A recently released survey conducted by Stratus, North Bridge Venture Partners and GigaOM Research found that 75 percent of firms are now reporting the use of some sort of cloud platform, and the worldwide addressable market for cloud computing will reach $158.8 billion by 2013, an increase of 126.5 percent from 2011.”

Kevin Parker of Rackspace says “But the real unspoken advantage of cloud adoption—and something not enough people talk about—is that it lets companies adopt modern development techniques, allowing businesses to innovate and reduce time to market. The ability to speed up development lifecycles and to deliver value to market on short intervals—this is how businesses are going to maintain their competitive advantage in this new era of cloud IT.

When the term “cloud” is mentioned, we visualize an “all or nothing” scenario. An example would be data backup and recovery where all the data and the processes are expected to be deployed in the cloud. But, this is not the only model that is possible. A hybrid model may be the preferred in certain cases.

In the case of data backup and recovery, for instance, the data can alternatively remain within the customer’s network and deployed off site at the customer’s choice location. The processes can be managed in the cloud. The data does not have to be in the cloud with the data backup administration. They can be separate. The benefit gained by deploying the data backup processes in the cloud is having the management of the data backup and recovery performed and scheduled remotely by specialists in this field. An additional benefit is to remove the burden of understanding and managing data backup processes from the already stretched IT staff.

There are Data Backup/Recovery Managed Service Providers (DB/R MSP) that provide remote management of the Backup process, along with professional Disaster Backup and Recovery consultation. Contracting a DB/R MSP with the model of remote DB/R management allows the enterprise to maintain their data locally without the need to hire new staff or train existing staff in sophisticated data backup and recovery processes.

For more information on the subject of cloud data backup and recovery management, contact Salvus Data Consultants.