This was the year you made the switch. With a lot of effort, you switched your entire structure to a cloud based system. And things are running smooth.
You are happy with a cloud based business model. The benefits are many. No longer do you have to worry about servers being in your office. Your data is virtual and distributed.
Unfortunately, a lot of managers fall into the trap of thinking out of sight, out of mind. Once a cloud provider is chosen, the upkeep is in the provider’s hands. No more worries on your part. What could possibly go wrong?
While moving to a cloud based system brings a number of advantages to your business, keep in mind that many cloud based systems offer no guarantees of availability or recoverability. Clouds can go down, data can be lost, connections between applications can be broken. It’s technology.
Instead, the cloud merely changes your approach to data recovery. You had a data recovery plan in place with your traditional, on-site system. That need won’t change as you switch to a cloud based system. Without a cloud based recovery plan in place, it’s not a matter of if, but when a disaster will occur.
Ask most business managers what their greatest risk of having to activate a data recovery plan is and you’ll most likely see natural disasters at the top of the list. Yet reality tells a different tale.
Hardware failures cause the biggest problems, occurring in about 55 percent of all downtime events. Human error is next at about 22 percent. Compare that to natural disasters occurring only about 5 percent of the time.
Before cloud computing, creating a data recovery plan usually meant backing up to either tape or disk. And while it worked for the times, there were obvious drawbacks. It’s difficult to set up, difficult to keep up to date, and may be difficult to recover entire distributed multi-site workloads. And disks aren’t necessarily secure.
The cloud has changed everything. Through virtualization, the entire server can be captured and copied or backed up to an offsite data center within minutes. This includes the operating system, applications, and all data in one convenient package. You can take it and store it multiple places, anywhere. And because it is encapsulated into one bundle, recovery times can be improved drastically over load times of more conventional approaches.
Sounds easy? It can be. But only if you create the plan before you have the need, and make sure you implement it and keep the process active on a continual basis.
With a little bit of work and advanced planning, you can be protected against almost anything that can deter you from running your business efficiently in the cloud. Not sure how to set it up? That’s where we can help.
Does your company have a cloud based data recovery plan?
