The cloud space has been beneficial due to the overwhelming data of organizations and it has undoubtedly proven to be one of the greatest innovations of the century. The benefits it offers to the multitude of organizations across the world are mind-boggling. Businessmen and technological researchers are excited about the major changes and miracles it has in store for the coming 5, 10, or say 20 years.
The effect of cloud services is such that many organizations rely completely on them for storing their critical data as well as sensitive workloads up on the cloud and start ignoring one major cornerstone of Information Technology – backup and disaster recovery. Many businesses do so because they feel comfortable in the cloud space and trust its services for reliability and security. However, if cloud was so secure, there must not be any outages? But the fact is – Outages occur every now and then & gives no other choice to administrators but to regret.
The reason is logical. While cloud is certainly reliable and secure, it is still made of cables and computers and most importantly is managed and run by none other than humans. Electrical components have their own pitfalls and humans are bound to make mistakes. This is not to scare organizations from adopting and implementing a cloud strategy – public, private, hybrid, or a combination; it is just to emphasize on the fact that whichever cloud computing service you choose, you must not overlook the need for a solid backup and disaster recovery plan.
Plan
Cloud-based backup and disaster recovery plans are much less costly than the traditional options and effective too. Hire a responsible and knowledgeable expert to line up a careful planning to decide on the selection of a plan that would save you from the potential threats in the long run.
Disaster recovery plans range widely from defining the technical requirements, managing your data and applications, executing test plans, etc. So, being realistic is important here as otherwise you will land up paying huge bills for services you do not actually use. You need to perform a detailed analysis of your budget, personnel, recovery options, existing technologies, etc. to design a specific plan for your organization.
Test
Once a plan is designed, an immediate next step must be testing. Nothing goes perfect without testing and nobody would want to invest in a backup and disaster recovery plan that defies performance when it is needed the most. Therefore, instead of being in a false sense of security, you must make sure that potential failings are caught in testing rather than when an actual outage occurs.
Cloud is undoubtedly a wonderful technology. However, compromising on the imperative backup and disaster recovery plan use the cloud to build one for your organization. We, the Net Activity, Inc. team offer reliable cloud services along with cloud-based disaster recovery options to serve your business with a complete security solution. Visit http://www.netactivity.us/services/cloud-computing-services for more details.
