Cloud Adoption’s Top Concern: Business Continuity
Organizations are increasingly citing business continuity as a primary driver for cloud adoption. With the growing use of commercial SaaS apps taking place at these companies, homegrown cloud-based solutions and mixed/hybrid cloud IT infrastructures as well as cloud-based solutions have become an effective way for IT departments to deliver scalable, highly available services with resilience and fault-tolerance built in. A case-in-point is cloud-based storage and backup solutions—by moving their storage contingency plans to the cloud, many firms are now enjoying a cost-effective, flexible, yet comprehensive way to ensure the safety of their data.
Cloud Services: Risks and Rewards
Though some continue to be leery of leveraging cloud resources, organizations are finding that the cloud’s value proposition far outweighs the challenges. IT environments and/or infrastructure downtime can have a myriad of negative consequences on the business, including loss of productivity and damage to partnerships and customer loyalty, among others. IT must adopt the latest, best-in-breed technologies to mitigate the chances of such failures. In today’s business climate, this means the integration of IT cloud-based services as part of a plan to ensure the continuity or uninterrupted provision of operations and services.
In terms of storage, cloud-based solutions are as flexible and resilient as other IaaS offerings. They can be customized and tailored to fit each organization’s unique business requirements and use case, and—as usual with the cloud— usage is metered and on a pay-per-use basis. For example, to handle failover, a typical organization might maintain a second physical site to mirror its IT infrastructure resources. With the cloud, one can spin up an environment on standby without incurring significant cost. This drastically reduces IT expenditures as well as reliance on the hardware, while enabling business continuity more effectively.
Reputable cloud offerings feature dependable services that allow for excellent continuity and backups when disaster strikes, with most adhering to service level agreements (SLA) that guarantee a certain percentage of uptime. In short, cloud-based storage, like all IaaS cloud offerings, is an effective solution for enabling IT business continuity.
Of course, disaster recovery services are just one component of a business continuity plan—many vendors include this as part of a wide-ranging suite of business continuity services. A comprehensive, customized disaster recovery plan, including cloud-based solutions when applicable, represents a best-of-breed solution for ensuring business continuity. Read the available disaster recovery solutions Expedient has to offer their customers.
