SBIR Phase I: Disaster Recovery and High Availability of Cloud Computing Applications, Data, and Services

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will establish the feasibility and commercial potential of developing software technologies that enable disaster recovery and high availability for cloud-based web applications and mobile app back-ends (apps). The innovations address the key pain points associated with public cloud use as revealed by interviews conducted as part of the NSF I-Corps program: disruption, privacy, and lock-in. The project plan is to design, develop, and empirically evaluate the utility, scale, and commercial potential of cutting edge proprietary software products that automate and make migration and failover easy for app developers that employ cloud-based services to implement their apps. The broader impact/commercial potential of this project results from its ability to benefit a wide constituency. On the commercial side, cloud and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) markets are growing at an alarming pace. This project is unique in that it combines the benefits of modern cloud platforms with the key missing pieces of all extant approaches to PaaS: disaster recovery, easy migration, and hybrid cloud use by apps and data across public and on-premise deployment options. The simplification enabled by this cloud platform with a disaster recovery solution lowers the barrier to entry and reduces both the risk and cost associated with public cloud use.