Business continuity includes strategies, plans, measures and processes to minimise damage caused by the interruption of IT operations in a company. It both ensures the operation of IT under crisis conditions and includes strategies that enable IT processes to be resumed easily and quickly after a failure. In general, the mission and goal is to ensure the continuity of the company and its economic activity.
How the cloud contributes to business continuity
The cloud has become an important part of business continuity for companies that cannot afford downtime. In an unpredictable environment, businesses need to be prepared for anything - spikes in demand on your e-commerce website, outside attacks, or simply allowing employees to work out from home without disrupting daily business operations.
Cloud services protect continuous availability and provide fast, reliable continuity support. Especially in times of digitalisation, more and more companies are migrating to the cloud. As a result, the share of business-critical online data and applications is also increasing. The cloud offers timely and error-free data recovery for business continuity and is therefore becoming increasingly important. In addition, the cloud also helps to ensure that business-critical applications remain available even if there is an outage at the main site - for example, due to a cyber-attack or natural disaster.
With traditional recovery solutions, it can often take hours to transfer data from on-site drives or servers to recovery hardware. In the past, traditional on-premise solutions could bring an entire company to a standstill if the main in-house servers failed.
For this purpose, cloud providers offer, for example, a global network and data centre infrastructure that enables fast data transfer. This geographical distribution of data centres allows short distances between the company's headquarters and the cloud for fast data transfer. It is up to your company to choose the location where your data is backed up. This reduces the likelihood that all of the provider's data centres hosting your data will be affected in the event of a disaster.
How cloud computing supports business continuity:
- Regular backups and simple failover (devices that take over when primary systems fail).
- Reduces downtime
- Better management of network and information security
- Scalability to meet the needs of your business; for example, you can keep critical data on-site and back up the rest in the cloud
- Helps reduce the impact of disruption of service (DoS) attacks
- Saves you from having to set up and maintain a costly physical location for your infrastructure
- Eliminates the need to synchronise software across two locations
- Reduces recovery time to just a few minutes - potentially
Moving to cloud systems can make your business more efficient, more adaptable and ultimately more profitable. While business continuity planning and strategy is a large and intensive task that should still be done in-house, the implementation and, more importantly, the infrastructure required for it should be provided by a suitable service provider via the cloud. This means that much of the complexity is outsourced to a specialised cloud service provider. Internal resources and budgets are saved directly. Or perhaps more importantly, the specialised expertise of the service provider can usually significantly increase the reliability of disaster recovery. The SaaS and cloud offerings of the providers, usually provide more redundancy and resilience than a single company can afford.