Traditional disaster recovery options involve a secondary data center or a contracted DR solution which is expensive, difficult to test, and often doesn’t even provide 100% recoverability as compared to the production data center. In many cases, medium and small companies can’t even afford a true disaster recovery solution and, instead, must plan on being down while new infrastructure is obtained and backup tapes are restored.

Thankfully, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers and new software technologies can make DR far easier and much more affordable for organizations of all sizes. With disaster recovery protection essentially being insurance that you hope you’ll never need, it’s important to implement solutions that keep DR costs low. But to make the transition from traditional DR to cloud-based DR, you’ll need to perform an analysis of costs between traditional DR and cloud-based DR.