A very significant development in disaster recovery outsourcing within the past year involves a move to provide infrastructure for such services from the cloud. Disaster recovery as a service has grown more popular, offering the potential for greater flexibility, reduced costs, and simpler, more frequent and less expensive testing. In mid-2012, for example, Symantec and Microsoft teamed up to offer Symantec's disaster recovery as a service solution for use in recovering Microsoft applications in the Windows Azure cloud platform. The move allows organizations of all sizes to recover data and replicate business applications from Windows Azure in the event of a local failure. Symantec officials believe this will allow customers to more efficiently and less expensively build, manage, and maintain multiple disaster recovery centers. In 2013, Symantec plans to expand its service to include offloading the operational and capital expenses of such centers. A number of smaller solution providers also are offering cloud-based disaster recovery services.
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