There’s no question that a certain leap of faith is involved in putting your organization’s crucial data and programs and applications “out there” in the Cloud.
But there is also no question that the Cloud can play a critical role in the restoration of your business continuity in the face of an unexpected IT emergency. Catastrophic system failures do happen, unfortunately, but the Cloud can be your best bet to help your organization carry out its disaster recovery plans quickly and completely.
1. Migrate Your Existing Disaster Recovery Plan into the Cloud
As a minimum, you should be sending key disaster recovery process information over to the Cloud – documents, files, procedures, scripts. Then if your data center is ever struck by disaster, you’ll have no problem accessing your vitally important that IT operations plans and business continuity information.
2. Set Up an Independent Communications System in the Cloud
Catastrophic system failure not only threatens your organization’s vital data, video and voice transmissions, but it can also prevent proper communications at a time when connections are needed the most. Put a communications system in the cloud, and make it independent of your primary data center, so that recovery team members, executives, third parties and other stakeholders can help bring recovery sooner. You may need an alternate system for web postings, intranet, voice, text and email.
3. Start Using the Cloud for Data Backup
When disaster strikes, you will need access to a version of the data that you normally process during regular operations. (Is it not of one of your most important assets?) This may also include archived data for customer service, regulatory or tax purposes. Data is easily exported to the Cloud, and it is hugely reassuring, in terms of business continuity, when it is safe during an IT crisis.
In fact, some industries such as nuclear, aerospace and pharmaceuticals need to retain records, and provide warranties and assurances that span decades. Without accessible, recoverable long-term archived data at their disposal, they may not be able to legally carry out regular business.
4. Start Using the Cloud for Selected Apps and Services
It is a wise idea, as opportunities and costs permit, and not just in times of crisis, to migrate individual or groups of applications and services into the Cloud. For example, you might migrate all of your organization’s desktop productivity tools (e.g. email, calendar, document, spreadsheet & presentation creation) to a cloud option transfers the responsibility for protecting your organization’s documents and messages to an off-site third party. This means one less headache to take care of when disaster strikes.
The number of Cloud-based applications is growing every day. MS Office 365, Salesforce.com and Google Docs are some examples. Using them constitutes a pro-active way to anticipate disaster recovery, by lightening the load on your primary data center.
It won’t be long before using the Cloud becomes second nature, and it will require a leap of faith not to use it.
