Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery in Cloud Computing ...

Business continuity and disaster recovery is extremely important for all businesses regardless of industry or size and rigid planning is required to mitigate the business impact should disaster strike.

The need for a business continuity plan within a company is crucial to ensure the continual running of the business after a disaster. It is a well-known industry reality that for every five businesses that experience a disaster two will go out of business within five years from the disaster date. This makes stark reading and underlines the importance of ensuring businesses have a robust, organised and manageable business continuity plan in place for such disasters.

In todays business environment disasters can come in various guises ranging from acts of terrorism to the threat from natural disasters and with the competitive landscape becoming more ruthless, business plans and strategies have a great significance, as they are the plans that will ensure the future trading and success of the business.

When a business decides to move into the cloud they are placing their businesss data, applications and software in the hands of a cloud computing provider. It is therefore important to ensure that this cloud provider has appropriate business continuity and disaster recovery plans in place because when a company transfers to the cloud environment they are placing a significant amount of their business resources within this environment. Therefore, it is important to ensure and understand what will happen if that cloud environment becomes unavailable due to disasters either natural or deliberate.

A business therefore needs to ensure that they choose a cloud computing company that is robust and one that they can trust and there are many reasons why this is important. The main point is that cloud users will often have little or no knowledge of what technology is being used and the security that is employed, so they are putting their whole trust in the cloud providers IT systems and infrastructure. The cloud users also will have no control on the management of this infrastructure or what data centres are used. Many cloud computing companies rent their data centres and the infrastructure that they employ from other cloud providers. This means that if a disaster occurs then the availability of all resources will be affected and it could be hard to get questions answered regarding uptime etc.

It is therefore important that these factors are considered when selecting a cloud computing company especially when considering business continuity and disaster recovery.

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Source: http://businessplustips.com/2011/07/10/business-continuity-and-disaster-recovery-in-cloud-computing/

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