City Governments Turn to the Cloud for Data Recovery

More U.S. cities are striving to improve their outdated IT operations — an effort that could save these local governments time and money. Migrating data from legacy data centers to the latest architectures and tools is a complicated process that can be timely and can result in data loss if not carried out correctly. To simplify the process and save on costs, these government agencies are using the cloud in a backup role, as a resource to absorb any data spikes that can occur and as a disaster recovery unit. 

When Asheville, N.C. needed to upgrade its data center, the city was facing a tight budget that only had room to support disaster recovery plans for a limited amount of applications. With the cloud, the city was able to move its disaster recovery operations to a usage-based pricing model that enables the city to use the cloud as a backup as needed during a disaster instead of paying for the ongoing costs of operating an entire physical disaster recovery unit. 

The city of San Jose, Calif., is also planning to use the cloud as a backup mechanism. According to the city's CIO, Vijay Sammeta, San Jose will migrate its virtual machines to the cloud over a 12 to 18 month period to manage backup and recovery needs. Other cities following in their wake include Newington, Mass., and Oakland County, Mich. 

Sammeta says, “When you think about all the components of a highly available service delivery stack: network, servers, database and the applications, it starts [to] make a lot of sense to simply let someone else worry about that and just build redundancy to the Internet."

Read more at GCN  

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