How to improve cloud business continuity

Although cloud computing is expected to guide enterprises as a new platform for key applications, but most companies say they will not put critical business on the public cloud as a private platform, and for now, their waiting is right and should wait until business continuity and disaster recovery in the next critical application of cloud computing.

Simply, in any combination of IaaS, PAAs, and SaaS, business continuity applications can use the cloud computing platform as a business support system for an IT system outage, that is to say, a business can continue to talk about internal systems for day-to-day processing, and through that system to ensure business continuity, You can also make cloud resources a "hot backup" of your enterprise.

Backup systems have been there for a long time. In the case of a bank, when a bank establishes a system, it typically makes a fully consistent backup with the production center in a particular data center somewhere, and the backup is activated when the production center crashes or is unable to operate due to natural disasters. Although the establishment of a disaster preparedness center may cost millions of of dollars, but if the loss of business continuity is likely to let the enterprise loss of millions of dollars per hour, two relative ratio is definitely the former

The use of cloud computing resources as a backup system is not new, but now a large number of innovative cloud service systems to give enterprises more choices. These systems provide all the services, from storage to security, application processing and testing, enterprise software, and even a complete platform, and these are all customizable. Now, companies can build a complete system in the cloud, but not to maintain resilience or reduce costs, but to have a platform to pay on demand, be able to provide all of the core information processing services and can be started at any time.

The value of disaster recovery for cloud computing

First, the cost of leveraging cloud computing is part of an enterprise business continuity strategy. No data center investment is required and no hardware or software costs are involved. In addition, businesses can start at any time when they need to, just pay for the actual cost of using the resource. This provides an opportunity for those enterprises that are unable to undertake the construction of the Disaster preparedness Center at ordinary times. This strategy can save 75% of the cost of the traditional method, and most of the savings are sustained operating costs.

Cloud computing providers typically have three types, namely, software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). SaaS and PAAs are important to the world of cloud computing, but when considering disaster recovery, you should first focus on the IaaS cloud computing provider.

IaaS providers typically provide an entire platform, such as Linux, Windows, or other operating environments, which are built in virtual space and configured for users of the IaaS provider. Businesses can use these infrastructures as they do with their own data centers. Infrastructure, or service, means that businesses only need to pay incremental fees.

Keep in mind that cloud computing providers charge in different ways. Some providers charge according to the storage space used, some will charge hourly, and some will charge for the bandwidth used. Before signing an agreement, an enterprise needs to understand the charging method and the corresponding service level agreement (SLA) and determine that the SLA defines the enterprise's expectations for the cloud provider.

Second, to consider the speed of setting up a backup, it usually takes 1-2 to six months to build and test the software. In this process, the enterprise does not need to purchase and test any hardware and software systems, or negotiate the data center site.

In addition to cost advantages, this is a more practical strategic advantage of using cloud providers for disaster preparedness. Companies can immediately become cloud computing customers using only one credit card, and may be given a free probationary period, or they may be free to use under certain restrictions.

"Customization" is the biggest strategic advantage for companies to use cloud computing to achieve disaster preparedness. Enterprise IT personnel can allocate and configure backup sites on demand, without the need to spend a lot of effort on hardware and software purchases, or to look everywhere for the right location of data center sites.

Finally, the cloud computing system is ubiquitous, as long as the browser and the Internet can be connected, the enterprise can access the core business system anytime, anywhere and continue the business. This solves the problem of the inability of employees to reach the office or workplace when a disaster occurs.

Conceptually, this means that if the facilities of the enterprise are not reachable, they will be able to access the critical applications and data needed to run the business as long as their core employees are connected to the Internet. Considering that the cloud computing system has been optimized for the network, including the use of redundant points to optimize performance and meet the provider's own disaster preparedness needs, the use of cloud-based applications should be relatively low risk, which also depends on the type of application the enterprise runs.