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Here are Computer Weeklys top 10 stories on cloud storage, disaster recovery and the pandemic in 2021.

Theses are apparently disparate areas, but very much connected. The rise of the cloud has seen it emerge as a key site for disaster recovery, and even more so during the pandemic, which has pushed cloud adoption in a general sense. But there is also the sense that the cloud solves everything, and thats not the case, as we see here, and there are effects from the pandemic and Brexit on compliance.

Articles here also highlight key ways that disaster recovery (DR) has changed during the pandemic, as well as the devil in the detail of recovery from disaster using cloud DR. We also look at another key cloud workload namely archiving but there are drawbacks too, and we look at one organisation that brought backup and archiving back in-house.

There were also articles that drill down into the key considerations for SMEs when it comes to cloud disaster recovery and whos best at what in DR among the hyperscalers.

And lastly, we look at customer deployments of storage technologies in-house that are still very strongly represented, despite moves towards the cloud, with flash storage at the Scottish agricultural ministry and an oil and gas firm that ditched storage and servers for hyper-converged infrastructure.

Covid-19 has changed IT. Previously, working remotely was a business continuity measure, but now it is the norm. That means disaster recovery has to adapt to new risks and new ways to respond.

We look at cloud disaster recovery and the potential complexities that can result from partial outages and restores as well as challenges around reconfiguring network and security.

The advantages of cloud archiving are ease of use and being well-suited to potential latency issues, but IT teams need to be aware of costs and issues around moving data from and between clouds.

France Tlvisions Publicit couldnt always get to critical data, so decided to repatriate backup and archiving from the cloud to on-site locations, with help from a managed service.

We look at the key areas of cloud storage compliance that can trip you up, with shared responsibility with cloud providers and data residency among the most important.

We look at key disaster recovery considerations for SMEs, including why backup is not enough, how to create a disaster recovery plan, best-practice DR testing and DR as a service.

We look at cloud disaster recovery from AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google to see which is best for provision of turnkey solutions, breadth of portfolio and modular building blocks.

IG Design Group gains a modern backup regime with data held on disk, in the cloud and long-term on tape in a move that has helped it to slash backup and restore times.

Summit E&P made a strategic move to Nutanix hyper-converged and away from NetApp and VMware and wanted backup that could handle virtual machines and physical servers.

Rural directorate ditched hybrid flash EMC SAN for Pure all-flash storage and cut developer time in half, while beta testing Cloud Block Store and planning container project.

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Top 10 cloud storage, DR and datacentre storage stories of 2021 - ComputerWeekly.com