Despite the best of intentions and attempts, Murphy’s Law has not been repealed. Make the cloud a part of your disaster-preparedness plan.
Natural disasters can occur with little or no warning. Power and other utilities can go out. Backup generators and other fail-safes can, well, fail. Disaster recovery (DR) needs to be part of every organization’s IT operations plan.
Unfortunately, it’s one step that companies neglect all too often. With so many other issues and concerns to be addressed, a “rainy day” topic like disaster recovery can sometimes seem like one to be dealt with at some vague date in the future.
But when information systems go down because of anything from flood to fire, a business can come to a complete stop – simply because that nebulous “some other time” date in the future suddenly became “now.”
Migrating to the cloud? Include a disaster-restoration plan
As more companies are making the shift to a cloud-based IT infrastructure, many of those organizations are still neglecting their disaster-recovery needs, mostly for garden-variety human-nature reasons. But those businesses are missing the perfect time to put DR plans and provisions in place, with the lowest opportunity costs they’ll ever have.
It’s crucial to protect mission-critical workloads from outage and data loss with a disaster-recovery plan managed by a cloud service provider – one that will ensure your knowledge base is protected. The fact is that cloud-computing platforms provide inherent advantages when it comes to protecting data and keeping it safe when all hell breaks loose. Those same attributes come in handy in quickly getting back up and running in the aftermath.
Keep the business running smoothly, even when the home office isn’t
The critical reason every organization needs a DR plan in place comes down to a straightforward concept – business continuity. From multinational companies to small businesses, the work must go on even when headquarters is off the air. Disaster recovery and business continuity are two concerns that go hand in hand. Both are likewise enabled by two key cloud-based information technology infrastructure advantages.
Traffic management in the cloud.
When mission-critical data workloads live in the cloud, it makes sense to control traffic between users accessing the data within the cloud. That way, no single node can bring down the entire network and disrupt operations. Data is not location-specific, and neither is the capacity of a company to transact business. The critical control points of a grid now reside in the cloud and are invulnerable to the effects of localized disruptions.
Everything is software.
Virtualization technologies like Amazon WorkSpaces (virtual cloud-based workstations served to a variety of devices) and Amazon EC2 (which provides virtual servers in the cloud) allow truly location-agnostic enterprise computing capabilities. These give mobile and remote staff access to the corporate network and all of the digital tools they use in the execution of their work. These are also particularly useful in the event of displacement due to a localized emergency.
These two core capabilities of modern cloud computing enable the ongoing preservation of data and the capacity for a decentralized or evacuated workforce to continue operations despite a natural disaster affecting any location of an organization.
A cloud-based IT infrastructure is only the first step in an effective DR plan
The second is securing the support of a managed cloud-services provider like CloudHesive. With the inherent advantages of cloud computing come new responsibilities and management concerns. CloudHesive can administer your cloud environment and check all the boxes for you – security, compliance, governance, DevOps, apps, and, of course, disaster recovery planning and provisions for business continuity.
CloudHesive provides all of its clients with the peace of mind that comes from knowing that their all-important IT infrastructure is always on, protected from online and offline threats, and prepared to support continuing operations when Murphy’s Law asserts itself.
See how CloudHesive can ease your burdens and watch your back, IT-wise. Learn more by getting in touch with CloudHesive at 800-860-2040 or through our online contact form.
