If you’re turning to cloud services to handle your data backup and disaster recovery needs, you’re not alone.

According to one survey conducted a few months ago by TechTarget and Computer Weekly, the adoption of cloud services for DR and business continuity will jump from just under 18% of enterprises to more than 28% in a mere six months.

Last year, disasters in the United States caused more than $60 billion in damage . And the future promises plenty more of the same, says a recent report from Swiss reinsurer Munich Re — especially in North America, where weather-related loss events have quintupled in the last 30 years.

Now add in concerns about inadequate backup of the data on employees’ smartphones and tablets, wayward virtual machines, cyberattacks and other security incidents …

As the end of Windows XP support looms ever closer, I’m getting more questions about DaaS — desktops as a service.

And for good reason: With cloud-based desktops as a service , you can tick several boxes at once and save money in the process — as much as 20%-to-30% over five years when you move from a physical desktop infrastructure to DaaS.

Of course, since DaaS is a hosted service, you avoid the upfront CapEx of a homegrown virtual desktop infrastructure. But three other major benefits may be even more important to some organizations:

The way you do business is changing fast.
It’s not just that you’re replacing your face-to-face interactions with a range of digital modes like email, instant messaging, and videoconferencing —now you need to insist that those modes be available anytime, anywhere on devices that are familiar, mobile and allow us to access and communicate any and all of your data at will.
Problem: How to keep up — affordably
You need communications capabilities that can stay apace of all this, which the plain old telephone system (POTS) cannot. The alternative has been IP PBXs that replace bundles of physical wires with a session initiation protocol (SIP) service called trunking.

Consider: Last year, according to Verizon , 54% of data breaches began as attacks on web applications, and for years one type of attack — SQL injection — has been the means by which 83% of stolen records were extracted. Meanwhile, says Gartner , 25% of all DDOS attacks this year will be application-based, and an increasing portion of these attacks may actually be diversions in which the bad guys use remotely accessible malware to target user accounts (for personal data or, in the case of financial institutions, for money).

In my last post, I pointed out that today’s speedy, low-cost connectivity is impacting network and application management. This time I’ll concentrate on the other significant trend changing network and application management: Virtualization and cloud services.

Today’s datacenter environments are not only quickly becoming hyper-connected, most have also undergone at least some degree of virtualization and use of cloud services. The combination results in new kinds of business applications and, ultimately, a new kind of network infrastructure that exhibits…

Greater traffic volume, notably storage traffic
A shift in traffic flows from top-down/bottom-up to peer-to-peer, server-to-server, and virtual machine-to-virtual machine (now as much as 80% by some estimates)
Increasing amounts of synchronization and replication data across the network
A flatter network hierarchy