Cloud computing is everywhere to reduce need for IT disaster recovery. The cloud helps businesses store information online and enables online data backup. CIO.com gives five reason why to the cloud is becoming so popular with companies and what they are doing to make it their own. Check it out below.

1. Sometimes custom is the only way
The choice to create its own custom software on top of a cloud infrastructure — in this case Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) —rather than customize an existing cloud service was a fairly simple decision.
As Aquent discussed its requirements with cloud providers, such as Salesforce, it became evident that Aquent could not provide the same services to its customers that it could with its homegrown ERP solution. On the ERP side, many vendors had no cloud solutions when the company was studying the issues in 2009.
“We asked cloud vendors if they knew anyone running custom ERP packages in a cloud environment and they could find no one,” says Zach Hunter, vice president of software development for Aquent. “A lot of vendors could not even spell cloud when we were doing this.”
While many companies sell cloud services to track and manage customers, Aquent’s staffing business is based on providing better services, so the company’s software development team decided to port its existing system and looked to host it on an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud.
2. Copy and paste is not so simple
To reduce latency and ensure maximum availability, Aquent maintained databases in colocation facilities in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Yet, the company feared that data maintained in those systems would quickly become fragmented, says Bolick.
“If you were in your office in Hong Kong, and you needed to find a resource for a specialty in Hong Kong, you would have to search the database in Sydney, but also the databases in New York and London,” says Bolick.
The company hired technology-services firm Distributed Logic of Woburn, Mass. to create a solution, a multi-master database replication system that could synchronize data between the three operational databases.
3. Latency, consistency matters
With a global operation, latency in the cloud starts to matter tremendously.
“It becomes very difficult or nearly impossible to use a real-time application a continent away,” says Mark Parsons, a lead developer with Distributed Logic, who worked on the Aquent project.
While the company has a standard three instances of its ERP system in the Americas, European and Asian markets, the flexibility of the cloud allows the company to add new instances as needed. It will likely add a fourth instance on the U.S. West Coast and may expand with a Japanese instance, says Aquent’s Hunter.
Selecting Amazon as its cloud infrastructure provider allowed the company to quickly spin up new instances even in countries where the communications infrastructure and language are different.
4. Be prepared for outages
Moving to the cloud is not an automatic disaster recovery plan. Planning is required. While cloud services can improve availability, they can also result in outages that affect a large swath of businesses. The recent Amazon EC2 outage in North America is proof of the dangers.
In Aquent’s case, its technology provider Distributed Logic created a multi-master replication system, so that Aquent’s cloud infrastructure could be continuously updated amongst all three of its current zones in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The benefit of this infrastructure design became evidence during a recent outage. While Aquent was not affected by the North American Amazon outage, its infrastructure allowed it to avoid a 12-hour Amazon outage in Ireland that took the company’s application server down in March, 2011. The company was able to point its European workers to the North American server while it quickly rebuilt the European server.
“Without the replicated data, we still would have been able to recover, but in the meantime, our users is Europe would have been without a system,” says Aquent’s Hunter. “So what we gained was availability.”
5. Agility also means the ability to move the office
As a staffing company with creative services clients, Aquent needs its offices to be near the creative centers of town. As those centers move, the company tends to shift its office space.
“Everything that the office does now — if you walk in and look at our agents, they are basically looking at screens and on headsets probably — all of that is channeled over an Internet link,” Bolick says.
Having its essential business processes and office functions in the cloud allows the company to simplify the movement of offices, says Bolick. The company has moved nearly ten of the key applications that run its office to the cloud, including e-mail, video conferencing, fax and its business reporting system.
“It makes it comparably easy to move an office,” he says. “We take a router and take the modem, plug it into a new location, and make some backend changes and we are ready to go.

If your cloud computing service provides disaster recovery services, would you be more apt to increase your involvement with the cloud? Would you want to hire an IT consultant to make your cloud secure with data recovery, would you pay for it?