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salaried employees who are getting paid despite the
fact that they are able to do no work. Moreover, any
lost time will have to be made up later, which further
compounds the cost-to-profit ratios concerning
whatever work is being done.
Assured continuity is also a major concern for the
accounting departments of most businesses; which
often factor in every detail of an operation down to the
annual cost of energy, supplies, and IT maintenance
and upgrade expenditures. In many cases, accounting
might not have even considered the prospect of IT-
related downtime.
Disasters and lost time due to IT breakdown(s) also
present great opportunities for competitors to swoop
in and steal your business / clientele. Your customers
might really value your service and even depend on it
themselves, but they’re not going to wait around for
you to get things straightened out, they’re going to
jump straight into the arms of your closest competitor.
How can cloud computing ensure
continuity?
There are basically 3 ways that cloud computing can be
leveraged to ensure continuity of operations:
A fully managed cloud service provider
–
Your
organization has transitioned over to cloud
computing and your broker / provider manages
your cloud infrastructure and has a backup /
resiliency / recovery plan in place.
An individually deployed cloud-based
backup solution
–
This would be services like
those offered by IBM under the heading of
business continuity.
An integrated (hybrid) solution that
automates backups
–
Your on-site IT model
incorporates an integrated cloud solution
which your organization configures to provide
automated backups.
Whatever type of cloud computing service you elect
to use for disaster recovery or to ensure continuity,
you might want (at the very least) have dedicated full
system, settings and storage backups performed on
a weekly or daily basis. If, for example, your entire IT
operation were to go down, having a complete copy of
your system and data on hand would allow you to very
quickly migrate to a backup cloud solution. In other
words, you should probably have an affordable and
fully managed cloud service solution set up and ready
to go (with up-to-date backup data) in the event of the
unforeseen.
Since most full-service cloud providers will often charge
you on a metered or “pay for what you use” basis, the
idea of having another IT solution you can simply “turn
on” is a very real possibility. You might be able to use a
cloud computing setup as a sort of backup IT system
until adjustments / repairs to the main infrastructure
are finished and operations can resume. However, it’s
worth mentioning that cloud computing offers many
real benefits over traditional IT, and you and/or your
business should strongly consider simply moving to the
cloud permanently.
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