Cloud Computing And Disaster Recovery

Cloud Computing - Is it right for your business?

The concept behind cloud computing is actually very simple, rather than having a physical server and PC at your office the applications are delivered via hosted services over the internet. A good example of cloud computing that people understand is a service like Spotify. On your laptop you don't store any of the music you listen to, it is streamed from a hosted service. In a business environment a number of core functions can be delivered this way, such as e-mail via a hosted Microsoft Exchange service, mobile email via a hosted Blackberry service right up to a completely hosted desktop with all applications hosted and shared data storage space.

There are many reasons why an increasing number of businesses are looking at hosted services, one of the primary reasons is that it allows small and medium size businesses to achieve high quality solutions without the traditional capital cost that would be associated with the traditional model of an onsite server. The charging model for a service such as hosted email is based on a per user per month price which means the cost of entry is extremely low in comparison.

In situations where a business may be growing very quickly cloud computing offers further advantages by the fact that resources can simply be scaled up as required whether that be additional processing power, RAM or disk space. The business does not worry about physical servers and therefore concerns about future capacity become redundant.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity can also be catered for offering businesses much of the protection that they would pay for as a separate service. Due to the fact that services are hosted from a secure data centre with all of the associated redundancy and back-up features you would expect of a large corporate organisation.

Disaster Recovery: Can your business afford to be without it?

Business continuity and disaster recovery is still an area that many small to medium size business have yet to fully prepare for writes Paul Tomlinson, Managing Director at Milton Keynes based IT services company Mirus IT Solutions, planning for every eventuality is increasingly becoming a modern business necessity and to be ignored at your peril.

For many, the perception is that solutions are too expensive and therefore a risk worth taking for an event that in theory is extremely unlikely. However with events such as the Buncefield explosion and the fire on the Brackmills estate in Northampton, these events do happen and not planning for how you would cope could have serious consequences for the future success or not, as the case may be, for your business.

Whilst headline grabbing events such as those already mentioned get huge media attention, the more micro events such as hardware failure or a flood in your office have the potential to be just as serious for a small business in the current economic climate. If your core business application server suffers a hardware fault, you have no email or access to your accounts system, you should have a back-up of that server but how long would it take you to recover to a full working solution, 2 or 3 days? For many businesses this would be an unacceptable period to be without these critical applications but most have made minimal or no provision to prevent it happening.

It is true to say that disaster recovery and business continuity solutions historically were expensive and therefore out of reach of many businesses other than corporate organisations. Most will operate a tape based back-up solution, with one member of staff taking the tapes offsite each day but as we have discussed the recovery times are significant. Among the solutions that have been used to reduce these times are full replication of your infrastructure to a third party data centre, this involves significant investments in both hardware and software, or subscribing to services that have servers and other network components on hand to be delivered to your location in the event of invocation. Whilst not eliminating the downtime the business is likely to suffer, these solutions give businesses an action plan to ensure it is reduced to a minimum.