ABSTRACT
For many businesses, particularly the small office through to medium enterprise, there has traditionally been a substantial gulf between that which is desirable and that which is achievable for IT systems. At a broad level and focusing on the consumers of the cloud, there are two key aspects to cloud-like service delivery: automation and service catalog. The automation is what allows someone to go to a web portal and request a new database server with a particular amount of storage attached to it. The service catalog becomes the curated menu of options for the consumers. Service catalogs tend to be categorized by a few different common naming approaches. The two most common naming approaches are usually aligned to either numbered tiers or precious metals. Regardless of how it is approached, a business should be prepared to have some flexibility for subscribers regarding retention times applied when providing backup and recovery options in a data protection service catalog.
