But as with all technology, the question isn’t if it will fail, but when. Many people have spent the last two years re-thinking their infrastructure, moving critical servers and server backups to the cloud, where they will be “safe.” That’s a recipe for disaster, because, as CRN has highlighted very succinctly, there have been many headline-grabbing cloud outages in the first half of this year alone. If you bought into the hype completely and you’ve put all of your eggs in the cloud basket, you may find yourself in serious trouble with a lot of broken eggs.

The remedy for this should be obvious. Rather than move all your critical server operations to the cloud, you should continue to keep a near-line server backup onsite, as your first line of defense. Companies that have a local backup – in addition to their cloud backup – don’t lose any sleep over cloud failures. It’s a blip on the screen and barely worth noting.

Let’s consider a scenario that’s a compound failure: your local server goes down and your cloud provider lets you know you can’t failover into the cloud because their data center was hit by lightning last night, which is exactly what caused a recent Amazon cloud failure in Europe. This is precisely why you need near-line backup as well. IT administrators know if they’re using a best-in-class business continuity solution like ShadowProtect, they can get servers running again in a few short minutes. If they’re also running StorageCraft’s HeadStart Restore technology in conjunction with ShadowProtect, users would barely notice the server went down.

So when putting together or revising your disaster recovery plan, save yourself some headaches and only give one ear to the hype. Make sure your plan covers multiple failures and includes near-line and off-site backup.

Cloud computing is one of those buzz phrases that is getting a lot of attention in the media these days – and for good reason. It is a good way to assure business continuity no matter what happens to your business because you can access your data anywhere in the world. That makes for a  great business model for backup and disaster recovery, in particular.

If you haven’t looked at ways to offer your customers some sort of offsite backup and disaster recovery, now is the time to do it. The ShadowProtect line of award-winning backup and disaster recovery solutions for Windows systems and data can help you accomplish this. That’s because ShadowProtect is complementary to all sorts of virtual solutions, allowing you to migrate your physical systems to virtual ones – and back again. This means you can have complete server backup onsite and offsite. You can failover in the cloud, if you need to, and access your data anywhere in the world. Sounds like a pretty safe solution for data backup.

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DRAPER, Utah, U.S.A. – StorageCraft Technology Corporation, a provider of innovative  disaster recovery, system migration, data protection and security solutions for servers, desktops and laptops announced it is hosting a series of online training events designed to make it easy for managed service providers (MSPs), value-added resellers (VARs) and other solution providers to offer affordable disaster recovery, data protection and system migration services and solutions to their customers.

The StorageCraft “Webinars” will introduce the StorageCraft ShadowProtect™ award-winning line of backup, disaster recovery and system migration software as well as the no-cost StorageCraft Reseller Partner Program and StorageCraft MSP Partner Program. The training session will last 45 minutes.

“We want to show partners how profitable it can be to provide disaster recovery, data protection and system migration services to their customers – even in a down economy,” said Curt James, vice president of marketing and business development at StorageCraft. “When times are tough, businesses want to make the most of the resources they already have. Using our solutions as part of an overall backup and disaster recovery plan is a simple way to do that.”