What are the benefits of cloud-based business continuity?

Disaster recovery and business continuity are integral to creating a reliable and stable business. With the cost of downtime skyrocketing and a Forrester survey revealing only 2% of businesses were able to recover from their latest incident in under an hour, the importance of having an effective business continuity plan in place has never been higher.

Using the cloud to provide disaster recovery and business continuity solutions is a major way businesses can ensure they maximise their downtime whilst minimising the disruption caused by an outage or IT failure.

Benefits of cloud-based business continuity:

Automatic backup

Traditionally, the backup of an important file – let’s say the client database – stored in the disaster recovery backup would be as up-to-date as the last time a physical tape was copied over. This could mean that a day’s worth of work would be lost due to an IT failure if the tape was taken daily. Of course, if the tape was taken less often, more and more data and hours would be lost in the result of the main data being lost.

Cloud-based disaster recovery, on the other hand, can store a nearly live copy of the file. Reducing the time lost due to data loss to a matter of minutes or possible seconds.

Less expensive

The fundamental structure of cloud has allowed for business to reduce the operating and upfront costs of IT. This is no different for disaster recovery. Replicating key business systems is now much less expensive as there is no need to purchase the dedicated infrastructure required for a disaster recovery system.

Thanks to the economy of scale, the costs are now shared between every user of the cloud provider’s service. Overall making establishing an effective disaster recovery system less expensive and more accessible for businesses.

Rapid recovery times

In the past, if a major IT failure occurred, in would roll a truck with a stack of servers maybe hours or maybe days after the business went down. This is of course if the business was actually lucky enough to have a deal with a disaster recovery provider.

Cloud-based disaster recovery systems are able to failover automatically, reducing the amount of downtime experienced after an IT failure to the scale of minutes. In turn, lowering the costs incurred from idle employees and preventing customers from being unable to access your service.

Offsite backup as standard

In order to keep your business’ data truly secure there must be a copy kept offsite – outside the physical business premises and away from the main file server or data center. This is so that if something does affect those locations, the backup is not lost as well.

Using a cloud provider automatically means your data will be being stored offsite, instantly adding a layer of reliability to your backup.

Summary

If you aren’t already backing up to a cloud platform or using it for business continuity, then it’s worth looking into. If security concerns are holding you back, be aware that security and encryption systems can give you military-grade protection without serious costs.