It’s every organization’s nightmare: a catastrophic loss of your IT data and functions. And as much as you imagine that it will never happen to your business or organization, the fact is that there’s no wishing away of power failures, or flooding, or egregious employee errors, or any other kind of disaster before it happens.
The only thing that really matters in this kind of crisis is the continuity of your operations. You need a disaster recovery plan that keeps you up and running as quickly and as fully as possible, and in this day and age that only means one thing – a cloud-based disaster recovery plan.
Using cloud-based services can facilitate complete disaster recovery in one of two ways: one before the fact, and one after. Either way, using a cloud-based service gives you the best chance for minimizing the damage.
1. You’re Prepared in Advance
The best way to use the cloud for disaster recovery is to become the good Boy Scout and be prepared for it in advance. By definition, the cloud is off-premises and less likely to be afflicted by the circumstances afflicting your main site.
You can set up in advance and “store” your disaster recovery protocol on the cloud that leaps into action when needed. Disaster recovery resources and tools can be launched immediately, and communications via the internet will help alleviate the confusion and chaos that inevitably hits an organization when disaster strikes.
Remember, the cloud could be a “virtual extension” of your IT infrastructure, so that disaster recovery can be triggered more quickly, minimizing business disruption.
2. It Makes it Easier to Recover
Even if you haven’t disaster-proofed all your business systems, a cloud-based service can still provide your best options for maintaining business continuity through a major IT crisis.
As the main or secondary site for your primary computing location, the cloud allows you the full range of options for internal and external communications that are so essential when disaster strikes.
Your cloud disaster recovery provider can connect you to resources that you may not currently have access to. In a pinch, this can be especially important when you have staff who are unable to respond quickly as a result of the disaster.
In all but a few circumstances, consider the cloud to be far better situated to not only withstand any of the failures or threats that have afflicted your main site, but also better positioned to provide some very timely tools and processes to get your organization back to normal as soon as possible.
Any IT Boy Scout would tell you that.
