Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity – Options from the Cloud

Business Continuity with Cloud Based Services

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Disaster recovery can be a much needed asset when introduced into a cloud environment. If properly prepared, it can be an ace you’ll want in your bag and can help your business prevent and/or rebound more quickly from any number of catastrophes. One surefire way you can prepare your business to better withstand the unexpected is through a virtualization strategy that incorporates cloud solutions. Consolidating physical hardware and running virtual machines in the cloud creates a safe haven for your business’s data. If physical disaster strikes, it probably will only be a matter of minutes before your business can migrate to the DR datacenter, while restoring and repairing physical server environments could take anywhere from hours to days.

There are various cloud solutions, such as Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMWare, and now even Apple has gotten into the mix, offering numerous solutions to help businesses virtualize and manage their IT infrastructures on the iClloud platform. Through a single Web-based console, your IT staff can perform a range of actions that help prevent disasters like data breaches, corruption caused by malware or unauthorized use.  These tools also support business continuity during disaster, since they enable IT staff to provide remote assistance, monitoring equipment and more.

If your IT strategy doesn’t include a disaster recovery or business continuity component, don’t wait for the next water main leak, fire or network failure to occur before you add one. Also, make sure your BC plan integrates into the overall communications and business plan for your organization. Having an organized plan that takes all critical functions of the business into account will make recovering from disaster considerably easier and less painful.