Using Cloud Computing for Disaster Recovery

Using Cloud Computing for Disaster Recovery

Jessica Carroll

Managing Director, Information Technologies

USGA

For us the most significant data protection initiative has been our disaster recovery in the cloud with IBM. For me, this is probably going to always be one of my absolute favorite, pivotal projects of my career. I say that because nobody else really is getting excited about it. Disaster recovery is not exactly the most glamorous topic and I don’t know of too many people who were going, “Yay, she’s finally got this for us!” But I was so happy because what it meant for me as the IT leader was: I’ve just protected our organization. I hope we never have to find out about it but if we do I’m going to be in a position to say, “We got you covered.”

We’ve had data protection forever; data tape back-ups we have off-site. We still do those things today but it was very much a 1990s mentality. What I was looking for was a more immediate result and the cloud really fit into that for us. So what I was looking to do specifically with IBM was take my most mission-critical data and back it up and put it in the cloud. So even though I have it on tape, I wanted something that would enable me to get me back to yesterday as quickly as possible. And off-site tapes which rotate once a week were not going to cut that.

So the cloud opportunity meant that without adding infrastructure into my environment, without having to add support staff to my environment, I could actually do a nightly back-up through the cloud – have somebody else watch it, monitor it, make sure it’s all taken care of – and know that it’s there for me if and when I should need to access it.