Using a cloud-based service can provide the best protection to your organization’s business continuity in the event of a catastrophic breakdown of your IT infrastructure. Cloud-based services are designed to work smoothly with an organization’s disaster recovery program in order to ensure communication is not lost, systems remain available, archived information stays intact and important DR documentation is accessible throughout the disaster situation.
And while using the Cloud constitutes only one of several alternatives for a disaster recovery program, there are three situations under which a Cloud-based plan may be the best fit for your organization, and the best way to implement your own disaster recovery and business continuity plans.
1. If You Have Many Web-Enabled, Web-Accessible Applications
Let’s not forget that when we talk about the Cloud, we are really talking about the Internet. Cloud-based storage is really data, documents or information stored somewhere on a server connected to the Internet.
So it stands to reason that organizations using a lot of web-enabled or web-accessible applications are better candidates for Cloud-based disaster recovery. A standard offering Cloud-based disaster recovery site can easily house these applications and seamlessly present them “virtually” to your users, even when processing has shifting physically from your primary site.
2. If You Are Particularly Vulnerable to the Threat of IT Failure
There’s no way around it, we are seeing an increase in civil unrest and increasingly disruptive weather patterns in recent years. As a result, some organizations and businesses find themselves inadvertently in locations that are particularly vulnerable to power loss, flooding, ice storm damage and other environmental threats to an organization’s daily activities.
Cloud-based services should offer IT infrastructure and facilities that are sheltered, protected or immune to the threats and exposures that you and your organization face. And should the Cloud-based service ever itself come under threat, it would have the ability to shift your data and processing out-of-the-zone, making it available again through the Cloud, essentially backing up the backup.
3. If You’re Protecting Time-Sensitive, High-Performance Systems
Your organization needs to determine if it is economically feasible and appropriate to enroll in a Cloud-based disaster recovery program. If your entire disaster recovery program consists solely of a multi-page document, then it is obviously not cost-efficient to sign up for a raft of Cloud-based services.
On the other hand, should your disaster recovery plan focus on reactivating massive databases, critical real-time applications, recovery tools and processing capabilities, then a Cloud-based disaster recovery system may be the way to go. Cloud-based services usually offer a flexible range of pricing options, from fixed-rate space and capacity buying through to transaction-based.
How much would you pay for the guarantee of a quick and complete disaster recovery?
