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Last month, NTT Com Asia launched a cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) solution that is said to enable enterprise users to operate a secondary DR site in public, private and hybrid cloud platforms.

To understand more about how cloud-based DR operates, Asia Cloud Forum interviews NTT Com Asia’s New Business Division Executive Vice President Taylor Man (pictured below), and asks how it can help businesses sail through at times of outages, such as the recent flood in Thailand that has plagued the country since July.

Taylor Man: The deployment of NTT Com Asia’s cloud-based DR solution EnterpriseCloud can be completed within days, as compared to traditional deployments that involve hardware procurement and installation which may take months to implement.

Enterprises are able to operate a secondary DR site in the cloud using on demand compute resources to meet varying conditions and emergency levels in the event of disaster, the recovery time is shortened to mere minutes to turn on the “standby” resources which would otherwise take hours or days in the case of traditional DR, thus meeting faster RTOs (recovery time objectives). 

Our "pay-as-you-go" pricing model allows enterprises to pay only for the compute resources used which makes it very cost-effective to maintain. Traditional DR would involve duplication of hardware, software and hosting that would cost up to 100% of the cost of primary site. It is estimated up to 60% cost reduction can be achieved with cloud-based DR solution because of the pay-as-you-go characteristic, as the actual chance to use a backup facilities is relatively small.

Furthermore, NTT Com Asia’s EnterpriseCloud suite incorporates hybrid solutions with a combination of private and public clouds, which can be customized to accommodate different and unique business environments for any enterprise.

Man: Businesses that have operations in Thailand may face extended outages, there are two immediate concerns that they need to address:

IT operations in Thailand might not be able to function as normal due to damaged and malfunctioning IT infrastructure, or local staff who are not able to operate the infrastructure. An enterprise might need to shift its operation to other countries that have sufficient resources in terms of labor and IT infrastructure.

To address this issue, a cloud-based DR solution can play a significant role as all the compute resources can be turned on immediately and CIOs can utilize all their labor resources within the region. Data and computing resources can be shifted to anywhere the customer desire, utilizing the capacity of our Tier one network.

In the case of any disaster, employees might not be able to attend to the office physically to perform their duties, which would lead to a sudden demand of remote access solution.

NTT Com Asia’s Virtual Office solution that runs on our EnterpriseCloud can provide secure remote access with Virtual Desktop’s capability and can be turned on within minutes. If the customer uses NTT Com Asia EnterpriseCloud DR, they can replicate their data to the cloud, and can decide where to move their data within NTT Com Asia’s coverage.

In the case that physical space is needed, our Business Resumption center solution can work in conjunction with our EnterpriseCloud DR solution to address different customer needs.