Find out how using cloud-based resources for disaster recovery and data storage will change in 2012, according to the vice president of marketing for Symform.

By Margaret Dawson

Disaster recovery, big data and cloud computing are terms often associated with big IT budgets and the enterprise.  But using cloud-based resources to ensure that your growing data set is properly protected and backed-up is an issue that every company and IT service provider should be thinking about, regardless of size.  

In fact, research suggests that SMBs are highly vulnerable to data loss, with 70 percent of SMBs never recovering after a disastrous data loss event and going out of business.  To make matters worse, research reveals that the majority of SMBs do not store data off-site – only locally – and that at least 15 percent of SMBs have no data backup or business continuity plans whatsoever.  Business-disrupting disasters don't generally include major disasters like earthquakes and tornadoes (most of the time), but include much more common "disasters," such as power outages, network issues, basic employee mistakes and theft.

This is the time to embrace your data and everything you need to do to manage it, secure it, access it and back it up.  The average business deals with hundreds of terabytes of data, and analysts expecting digital data to grow by 50 times between now and 2020 into the zetabytes.  It’s the time to embrace the cloud and gain the technical, business, and economic benefits the cloud can bring.

2012: Reassessing Data Management and Backup Practices

2012 will be a wake-up call for SMBs and their IT service providers to reassess current data management, storage and backup practices. But you will have to work through the noise, as you’re faced with a dizzying array of on-premise and “prosumer” cloud storage options like iCloud and Dropbox, which may or may not fulfill your needs around security, reliability and cost. This community has incredible power and will use it to drive vendor change around pricing structures, integration between local and offsite solutions, and agility around leveraging existing infrastructure and solutions. In the coming year, SMBs will re-evaluate their buying criteria in favor of more secure, scalable, enterprise-class storage and backup solutions – but only if the price is right.

2012: The Cloud Will Change the Way You Do Business

In the next year, IT solution providers should focus on augmenting current service portfolios with innovative cloud offerings. Contrary to popular belief, the cloud is not putting IT folks out of work.  Surviving the age of the cloud requires a shift in our thinking and even in our training. We still need smart IT people to figure out if and when the cloud is right for customers, based on a customer's overall business and IT goals and the current infrastructure. If you don’t embrace the cloud, your customers are going to go there with or without you. 

The good news is that the trend is well on its way.  A recent CompTIA study showed 40 percent of channel companies are both selling and using cloud offerings, compared with just 15 percent in 2010.  This pace will accelerate next year. IT service providers should look to innovative cloud offerings to differentiate themselves from the competition. Emerging cloud storage and backup options, in particular, will keep providers from having to build out more costly data center infrastructure. These options also offer an attractive alternative to traditional onsite storage, which has become a common service add-on for many solution providers. 

2012: Is the Green Data Center Really Green?

My last key prediction for 2012 is the debunking of the green data center. There’s been a great deal of hype that cloud computing and the latest virtualization and server technology is enabling more environmentally friendly data centers.  It’s absolutely true that these and other advancements are helping minimize the overall networking footprint for many companies. However, data center sprawl is going to accelerate as companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon build out massive global infrastructures to power their cloud-based services.  Today, data centers account for 14 percent of all carbon emissions and two percent of all power consumption in the U.S.  If left unchecked, these numbers could easily double. 

Margaret Dawson is the vice president of marketing at Symform, a decentralized cloud storage provider.