8x8 lands Garden Grove cloud recovery deal

Municipal governments may be starting to take a hint from corporate enterprise deployment of cloud services for disaster recovery purposes and investing in the technology themselves. That latest municipal government to do so is the City of Garden Grove, Calif., which has tapped 8x8 (Nasdaq: EGHT) to provide cloud-based disaster recovery for its VMware vSphere virtualization platform.

The deployment also shows evidence of how virtualization of server and desktops resources may be an initial step toward broader investment in remote cloud support for those resources. For both enterprises and government agencies, the virtualization and cloud computing trends may point toward an evolution to operational bases that are far less reliant on their own physical infrastructure than they are now.

Garden Grove's investment in 8x8's hosted cloud services appears to be driven more by disaster recovery, by government agencies may also find-as corporate enterprises have-that a full commitment to the virtualization and the cloud can save them a lot of money at a time when they might be cutting staff and public services for budgetary reasons.

The hosted Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering from 8x8 covers Garden Grove's entire administrative operation with the aim toward as little downtime as possible in the event of disaster. The move comes as Mother Nature continues to remind us--in the form of earthquakes and hurricanes--that she may disrupt enterprise and government communications anytime she pleases.

Andy Schwabecher, general manager of hosting at 8x8, said the company is starting to see more interest and requirements from governments at all levels--federal, state and city agencies--for cloud-based recovery solutions.

For more:
- see the 8x8 release

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