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Deploying disaster recovery and data backup in the cloud can be cheaper and more effective than the traditional hardware-based approach.

That’s according to Eran Farajun, executive VP of Asigra, provider of software for cloud-based backup deployments. He delivered a presentation on cloud disaster recovery Monday at the DatacenterDynamics conference in Toronto.

Users of Asigra Cloud Backup include data center services providers, such as Terremark, NTT, Interxion, Cincinnati Bell, HP and Telecom Italia, and end-users, such as Red Cross and the Canadian insurance company Logiq3.

Cloud-based disaster recovery or data backup end up costing the customer less than going the traditional route because it does not require duplicating the primary physical infrastructure, Farajun said in an interview.

“With cloud VDR (virtual disaster recovery), you don’t need that because you’re restoring to virtual machines,” he said. “You don’t have as much infrastructure being used.”

Because the DR infrastructure is virtual, disaster recovery testing and drills can be done more frequently and cost less than lengthy tests and drills of traditional DR deployments.

Traditional tape backup requires a slow manual backup process and a different backup method and platform for every device. Recovery time from tape is also slower than recovery from cloud, Farajun said. Other limitations include issues specific to physical media and the need for software agents on all network servers.

In contrast, cloud back-up and recovery are efficient automated processes, with features like autonomic healing, agentless architectures, highly-secure encryption methods and support for heterogeneous environments.

Farajun said virtual disaster recovery can be deployed both in-house and at a commercial provider’s data center. The deciding factors there are regulatory compliance, security, skill of the IT employees and their availability to focus efforts on building and managing an in-house VDR solution.