Forrester Consulting study finds cost, business continuity benefits from cloud backup and disaster recovery

Maybe you have read about cloud database backup and disaster recovery (DR) but wanted to know more about the results achieved by real companies. Would you be surprised to find out that enterprises using the cloud for DR reported better success at meeting their service level agreements (SLAs)?  They do. And that businesses using the cloud for database backup achieved reduced storage costs and the ability to back up more frequently? They have. In December 2013, Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to identify database backup and DR challenges for mid-to-large enterprises, and to find out how these companies are taking advantage of public cloud to tackle the challenges. You can read the full study here.

With SQL Server 2014, Microsoft introduced and enhanced a number of ways to provide better business continuity in the cloud, including easy backup to Microsoft Azure directly from SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and a free tool that enables backup to Azure for older versions of SQL Server.  SQL Server 2014 also introduced cloud disaster recovery, the ability to deploy an asynchronous replica to Azure for fast failover.  You can learn more about how customers are benefitting with these stories from Lufthansa Systems and Amway.   

As a preview, here are a few highlights from Forrester’s in-depth survey with 209 database backup and operations professionals in North America, Europe, and Asia:[1]

• Enterprise struggle with backup and DR for critical databases.  Storage management, security, and administration are among the top challenges.
• Tier-2 backup requirements are growing. Fifty-six percent of respondents are backing up their Tier-2 applications on a daily basis – double what the ratio was just three years ago.
• The top benefit of using cloud backup is saving money on storage costs.  Next most cited were the ability to back up more frequently, and saving money on administrative costs.
• A majority of enterprises want to improve DR capabilities.  Some 79% answered that they agree or strongly agree with the need to improve disaster recovery capabilities in their database environment.  
• Many plan to extend DR to the public cloud.  Forty-four percent of enterprises either are extending DR to the public cloud or plan to do so.  And ninety-four percent of enterprises that are doing DR to the cloud say it helps to lower costs and improve SLAs.

If you are interested in finding out about Microsoft SQL Server backup to the cloud and cloud DR capabilities, you can read more here.  And if you’re ready to dive in, you can get started with backing up SQL Server 2014 to the cloud using these easy steps.  Greater business continuity awaits in the cloud.

SQL Server Team

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