How the Cloud can improve your Business Continuity Strategy

The turbulence of the current economic climate combined with the equally unsettling scenes of the summer riots, could point towards companies requiring a more stringent business continuity strategy. You could be forgiven if you thought I was scare mongering - because more often or not, it’s the more basic day to day issues such as flood, fire and theft that affect 90% of firms. The old case of data security on increasingly aging hardware remains a significant factor for many businesses in the fight against downtime. It is therefore the convergence of both backup and replication of a physical server that form the basis of any business continuity strategy.

 

Cloud computing has long been associated with improved security and greater resilience than an on premise solution. Sceptics have argued that less control is achieved when one’s servers are offsite. But now that Microsoft has reshuffled their licensing prices in an effort to move the sceptics amongst us to a hosted environment, can the argument against Cloud Computing, still present a viable resistance? 

 

Alex Parker, CTO at Commensus, looks into the benefits of utilising Cloud Computing to aid a company’s business continuity strategy, “The first thing to analyse when looking at disaster recovery is the amount of data that would be lost should a failover occur. Solutions that don’t replicate in real time present a huge challenge as there is potential for a large amount of data to be lost. Here at Commensus we use our Private Cloud to synchronise with your physical server. This results in 0% data loss should a failover occur. If you decide to host your servers in the Cloud then DR is included within the very foundations of the platform."

 

Parker continues, "The second thing to consider is the return to operation (RTO) speed. If you experience an outage, you need to know that your server will be bought back to operation within a given period of time. At Commensus we provide an RTO of just 10 minutes.” 

 

Online backup can also be provided through the Cloud. A seed of data is taken from your server and put onto our platform. Every night, the differential (or difference in data) from the previous night, is backed up through the Internet to protect your critical documents. Parker continues, “In the event of data loss, Commensus can provide you with the most up to date version of your documents, ensuring you’ll never lose another important version again!” 

 

In short, the Cloud is the future for cost effective business continuity. The days of tapes and expensive colocation facilities are now over. In today's market, it's all about the type of platform that you choose to host your continuity arrangements on. Find out more about the Commensus C-VIP platform.