(The following is the Executive Summary of a recent NJVC Executive Whitepaper. The full version will be available at NJVC.com )

Cloud computing, as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is a model for enabling "… convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction." NIST is implying the economies of scale that go with cloud computing when it refers to a pool of configurable computing resources.

With its popularity seeing a big increase in large, small and medium companies, cloud computing, specifically software-as-a-service, has grown over 20 percent across the world this year and will continue its huge growth over the next four years, according to a new Gartner study.

Gartner said SaaS has grown 20.7 percent since last year when it made $10 billion. The North American region is where the service is most popular, and is forecast to take over 63.6 percent of the SaaS worldwide revenue by 2015. Sharon Mertz, research director for Gartner, said that the increasing familiarity with the mode, oversight on IT budgets and the growth in popularity of cloud computing across the world were among the reasons for its growth this year.

A bank of batteries at AIS in San Diego provides a steady supply of power and can hold an electrical load up to 45 minutes before the load is transferred to a diesel fuel-powered generator. The system functioned properly during last week's blackout.

The corporate world dodged a big one last week when the power went out ----- not just here in San Diego County, but everywhere from coal-fired plants in the Midwest to accounting firms extending across the United States.

This is because corporations have shifted their sensitive computing data to the cloud computing environment, or hidden places where banks of leased computers can be kept with enough space, power, cooling and security.

If a disaster struck your company, could you recover? Do you have a place to store your data so it's safe and accessible, and do you have a way to recover it after a disaster without bankrupting the company?

"Recovery in the cloud is offering customers reliable and cost-effective options to increase application availability," says Shanmugam. "It's no longer a matter of do you need higher application availability but how can you do it effectively and efficiently compared to traditional recovery models."

The IT services provider backed by telecoms tycoon Denis O'Brien has invested €350,000 and created five jobs in support of a new cloud-based online back-up service.

To date Network Recovery has been best known for its suite of disaster recovery and business continuity services, which it has sold to clients in Ireland, Britain and the US.

However, the company now sees an opportunity to play in the internationally traded services, according to its recently appointed managing director, Paul Lynch.

New Delhi: The trigger was rather simple: an employee plugged in a wrong cable, and that's it. For two days, the company was stuck in a black hole. While most staff merrily enjoyed the welcome break from work, anxious souls in the IT division sweated in their airconditioned rooms, striving to up a system that had gone down abruptly.

This was not the case of just one office. Across Asia-Pacific, 95% companies experienced downtime or a data loss experience in the last one year. A CA Technologies' survey singles out IT systems' failure as the biggest cause (70%+) of data loss. External attacks on IT (over 40%) and human error were also found as key culprits, though not to the same extent (roughly 40%).

Disasters, both manmade and natural, can strike at any time, at any place. And if you're not prepared, your business might be forced to close - which, even if only temporarily, could lead to devastating consequences.

Ravi Sundara, partner and firm manager at The Stolar Partnership, says that a comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plan is key to ensuring a business' survival in the wake of a catastrophe.

"With proper planning and preparation, a business can place itself in a better position to ensure that it will continue, even in the face of disaster, which is important to a business's customers, employees, management, owners, business partners and markets," says Sundara.

Smart Business spoke with Sundara about how to be proactive, the legal issues that may arise if you are unprepared and the importance of having off-site backup.

Disasters, both manmade and natural, can strike at any time, at any place. And if you're not prepared, your business might be forced to close — which, even if only temporarily, could lead to devastating consequences.

Ravi Sundara, partner and firm manager at The Stolar Partnership, says that a comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plan is key to ensuring a business' survival in the wake of a catastrophe.

"With proper planning and preparation, a business can place itself in a better position to ensure that it will continue, even in the face of disaster, which is important to a business's customers, employees, management, owners, business partners and markets," says Sundara.

Smart Business spoke with Sundara about how to be proactive, the legal issues that may arise if you are unprepared and the importance of having off-site backup.

The U.S. Small Business Administration and the American Red Cross have joined forces to intensify outreach efforts to educate the public about the importance of having a disaster recovery plan in place.

"Given the recent devastation caused by tornadoes and flooding in communities from New England and the Midwest to the Southern states, and the start of the Atlantic Hurricane season, we recognize the importance of helping people learn how to protect themselves," SBA Administrator Karen Mills said in a statement. "This collaboration with the Red Cross will allow us to draw on each other's resources to make emergency preparedness a way of life for individuals and businesses."

The term "disaster recovery" has an oddly impersonal meaning in the computer industry. When IT people use those words, they're usually talking about recovering data and restoring business operations-not about the human response to catastrophe.

Yet disasters such as floods, earthquakes or even nuclear accidents quickly rewrite the rules of the recovery process, as the senior IT executives interviewed for our cover story ("How to Be a Better Leader in a Disaster") agree. They each discovered how much personal leadership matters in helping the people around them cope during real crises. While we may think of first responders as police or emergency workers, in the workplace, the CIO and IT team are among the initial responders, tasked with restoring the business's most essential systems.

More and more industrial enterprises are wising up to the fact that the development of a strong disaster recovery plan is a high-priority business task, and leveraging technology is one of the more effective ways to achieve that end.

When it comes to embracing cutting-edge technology to protect business data, it appears the industrial sector is at or near the head of the pack.

More and more industrial enterprises are wising up to the fact that the development of a strong disaster recovery plan is a high-priority business task, and leveraging technology is one of the more effective ways to achieve that end.

A third of IT managers and users in the travel sector are "unsure" that their disaster recovery plans would work successfully after a technology failure.

Data centre hosting firm City Lifeline interviewed 105 attendees at this year's Travel Technology show to measure disaster recovery plans in the travel industry.

The survey found that almost a fifth (17 percent) of respondents admitted to not having a disaster recovery plan in place, as they felt "it wasn't necessary for their business".

But when questioned further about how they will be allocating their IT budget this year, over a third (35 percent) said they will be investing in data centre facilities and equipment.

In Lauren Whitehouse's latest Storage magazine column, learn about important data backup technologies that can help you meet your backup recovery time objectives (RTOs) and reduce the amount of data being backed up. Technologies like snapshots, image-based backup, continuous data protection (CDP) and replication should be in any savvy backup administrator's arsenal because they can streamline backup windows and even help your disaster recovery processes.

Companies who are concerned about data loss may want to follow the example of those who are looking at business continuity and disaster recovery schemes.

According to research conducted by AT&T, 84 per cent of executives questioned have now put plans in place to ready themselves for any disasters.

Japanese telecom and media giant Softbank will partner with Korean wireless firm KT Corp. to build data centers in South Korea, the companies said this morning. The $65 million joint venture is designed to offer cloud computing services, with an emphasis on disaster recovery services for Japanese firms.

The Disaster Recovery Hour can be heard in its entirety on podcast. The podcast series is free and available at iTunes or by email subscription at http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheDisasterRecoveryHourWithChrisPlunkett. "Feedback from our audience indicated that listeners would like to have the option of having the show downloaded to their iPods and personal computers, making listening more convenient especially for other time zones and countries" stated Bill Moraites, Producer.

Some take it for granted that a disaster will never strike their organization. Rather than developing proactive solutions for such an event, their focus usually falls on other corporate IT deliverables. How about you? Does your company have a comprehensive disaster recovery plan that would allow your business to function in the event of a disaster?

UAB's Terrell Herzig emphasizes training to handle multiple roles.

UAB Hospital was able to keep its information systems running in the critical hours after tornadoes ravaged Alabama thanks to its disaster recovery planning efforts, Herzig says.

A disaster can strike anytime, anywhere. Recent catastrophic natural disasters in New Zealand and Japan have only amplified the randomness of these events. Likewise a business disaster can happen at any time and can have significant impact across multiple elements of an operation including supply chain to financials. The longer you have been in Business without a disaster the more likely one is around the corner.

Richard Dolewski is a certified systems integration specialist and disaster recovery planner and Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Business Continuity Services for WTS. His recent book, System i – Disaster Recovery Planning, is available at amazon.com.

When it comes to backup and recovery, only regular testing will ensure success.

This week, I visited a prospective client who was ready to invest in disaster recovery systems. They have an office in Brisbane, and an office in Christchurch. Here is the story as it was told to me...

"We were lucky in Christchurch, and have had no real news to report from an IT perspective. But, it made our management team think about disaster recovery planning – especially after what happened to us in Brisbane.

Goodbye, flash drive. Farewell, compact discs. Hello, cloud.

As cloud services develop, storing media on removable-storage devices is becoming secondary as more people opt to keep vast amounts of data in the cloud.

While individuals are taking advantage of storing information in virtual servers or other hardware stored remotely, many businesses that have a large collection of sensitive data aren't headed there just yet. Still, some analysts and companies that offer cloud services think that will soon change.

DR is a term which is often confused with other pieces of the Business Continuity (BC) model. Let's first examine that model: BC requires local high availability (HA), off-site disaster recovery, and long-term archiving for mass data retention and compliance. The confusion usually starts here. As you can read, DR is one component of the BC model.

So let's suffice to say that your business has some sort of local HA. That HA is where 90% or so of outages happen. Local outages, if not prepared for, can costs company's thousands of dollars.

Findings show that the cloud is perceived by nearly half of the respondents to be a viable option for disaster recovery, however many have yet to overcome security and reliability concerns. The cost of information technology (IT) downtime is still elusive - 54% cannot quantify the cost of an hour of downtime. At the application level, availability has never been more critical. Microsoft Exchange and SQL ranked No. 1 and No. 2 respectively as the top mission-critical applications. The details of the results follow.

Featured Event: Online Information Asia Pacific — March 23-24 in Hong Kong

Hindsight is 20/20. You only get to realize the importance of doing something when the time comes for you need it. Disaster recovery planning is just that — it's something you do now, in order to avoid problems in the future. In the Asia Pacific region, though, a big percentage of small and medium businesses (SMBs) do not have adequate disaster recovery systems in place.

According to APAC 2011 SMB Disaster Preparedness Study released earlier, a majority of APAC companies forgo disaster recovery planning, with 52% of SMBs in the region not having a DRP in place. Among these, 44% do not think that computer systems are a critical part of their business, 38% have not considered the need to put up a plan and 28% do not have disaster recovery in their list of priorities.

Recent natural disasters in Queensland have highlighted just how fragile some businesses are.

Interesting estimates coming from the US suggest that more than 40% of businesses affected by a disaster never resume, and of those that do 25% will close their doors within two years.

However, it's not all bad news according to Dean Marinac, CEO of I generation and a leading business advisor, "These are not great statistics but I believe they can be positively affected with some proper planning. For most of us, our business is our life and as a result, we get caught up in what's happening right now rather than what needs to happen down the track. "

Marinac says it's important to educate businesses on what they can do when their business is completely shattered by unforeseen events and circumstances. He believes that only a handful would have a solid 'Plan B' if something happened to their business.

When it comes to disaster recovery CIOs get it, business execs don't.

Not only do they undercut the importance of such planning, they also fail to understand how technology failures can affect their companies, says a new survey conducted by Harris Interactive Inc. and sponsored by SunGard Availability Services.

If upper management isn't seeing that customers are gauging their success by availability and continuity, they should.

Joe Murrayvice president of technologyHx Technologies Inc.

Seventy-one percent of IT executives identified disaster recovery and business continuity planning as very important or crucial to business success. Only 49% of business executives felt that way.

In the aftermath of Queensland's severe flooding and the 300km/h destructive force of tropical cyclone Yasi, all businesses need to consider how they might prepare and act in an emergency. A disaster recovery or business continuity plan is a good start. Even though the best-laid plans can go awry – as some Queensland businesses found out – some preparation is better than none.

For the Brisbane office of law firm Freehills, it was imperative that some staff members stayed on the job, despite its CBD office being closed after the floods. About 30 people were working behind the scenes as a client, gas company Santos, was approaching the final investment decision on a $16 million project. Key members of the team walked to the nearby Sofitel hotel, where the Freehills' IT team had set up conference rooms as temporary office space. However, as the flood waters closed in, the head of the Brisbane office, Michael Back , decided that a more efficient solution was to swiftly pack up the team and transport them to Freehills' Sydney office.

Over 40 percent of small to medium businesses in Australia and New Zealand do not have disaster recovery plans in place, Symantec has found.

The security vendor surveyed 200 local businesses last October and November as part of a global disaster recovery survey of 1,288 global small to medium businesses (SMB).

Local respondents reported experiencing an average of four outages per year. These were caused by power outages, natural disasters, malicious activity, employee accidents, and IT upgrades.

Symantec's regional SMB director, Steve Martin, said Australian businesses tended to brush off the risk of disasters, with 18 percent claiming that disaster preparedness was "not a priority".

If your business hasn't experienced a disaster yet, chances are, it will someday. For businesses, having a good disaster recovery plan can mean the difference between surviving those events and shutting down for good.

According to the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, the world averaged 392 major disasters causing $102.6 billion in damage per year between 2000 and 2008. In addition, many minor disasters—a snowstorm, a fire, a broken water main—damage business-critical servers and result in costly downtime.

A report has revealed that hackers have run wild through the networks of at least five oil and gas firms for several years, according to McAfee. Through a combination of con tricks, weak security controls and several vulnerabilities in the company's infrastructure, the hackers managed to gain access, stealing important information.

The information included documentation about oil exploration and bidding contracts. However the oil and gas firms said the attacks did not dent their effectiveness as a business.

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) has advised its 1000+ flood-affected members to take specific steps around the restoration of damaged servers to ensure practices are able to retain vital medical records.

RACGG – the safety and quality professional body for GPs – has distributed an IT system flowchart [pdf], among other documents, to provide clear advice on how best to restore systems.

"What's more interesting is the demand for cloud services. One in four SME's asks their solution provider for cloud-based disaster recovery and backup services. Again, the proportion of end-users seeking this service from IT solution providers is higher, but at least one-third of the telephony channel's customers are asking for the service by name."

The Australian Information Industry Association is leading the IT effort across the country, offering support and recovery to aid victims of the disaster.

Brisbane-based Microsoft Queensland director Patrick Pathinathan, who has been helping customers affected by the floods, expects bigger organisations to escape largely unscathed, as they would be equipped with proper disaster recovery centres and procedures.

Mr Pathinathan said it was the mid-tier companies that posed the greatest concern as floodwaters ravaged the Brisbane CBD and other areas.

Technology providers and businesses will be forced to move their disaster recovery facilities in the aftermath of the Brisbane floods, the head of industry group Software Queensland, John Vickers, has warned.

As substantial sections of the city remain inundated by floodwaters, back-up generators intended to keep systems running have largely failed because of their location in basements or at ground level.

Mr Vickers said that a key issue confronting businesses was that a number of disaster recovery facilities were in the inundated suburb of Woolloongabba, while others were located in Toowoomba, which was hit by a freak flash flood.

"You need to really think where flood plains are and not put your DR areas anywhere near [them]," Mr Vickers said.

If you are a small business owner in Australia, then you probably have never thought that it’s relevant have a plan that caters for fast recovery and business continuity in the event of a disaster. You may have thought that a business plan for disaster recovery and business continuity was too expensive or unnecessary. The events experienced in Queensland Australia over the last week demonstrate that this could not be further from the truth.

Hosted Continuity is the new alternative in disaster recovery (DR) solutions for both SMEs and larger corporations.  It is a fully managed off-site IT back-up service that captures the entire operating environment in real-time.  This enables near immediate local and remote recovery so you can confidently assure continuity of your service to your customers. 

By introducing the Hosted Continuity Appliance (HCA), Hosted Continuity is able to compete aggressively with Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) standards of higher priced business continuity solutions by indefinitely storing 72 hours of backups at 15- minute intervals and 30 days backups locally on the HCA. In addition Hosted Continuity retains its policy of immediate offsite environment and data transfer to its Datacentres.

Are there cost benefits for outsourcing Disaster Recovery over traditional in-house methods?

Choosing between creating a disaster recovery solution in-house or outsourcing disaster recovery is a fundamental part of creating a Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery strategy. The in-house approach may be tempting, but is it cost effective? According to an IDC study, companies that leverage in-house DR sites spend 32% more than those opting to outsource.

Understanding the benefits of managed services.

Find out how Enterprise Managed services can improve IT efficiency and staff resources, whilst reducing the business risks and operational costs associated with disaster recovery, data backup and archival.