Business continuity and disaster recovery
Now the flood water is receding from Brisbane, Ipswich and the other Queensland regions (not forgetting the latest floods in New South Wales, Tasmania and Victoria or even the fires in Western Australia) many businesses are beginning to try and get back into their properties and sort out the damage caused. Business continuity and disaster recovery plans have been tested to extremes throughout Australia over the last week and will do over the coming weeks. This may be to unplug the server from its temporary home and plug it back in at the office or recover offsite backups and install on a new server. Either way, every business will be crossing their fingers that their plans have worked.
There is a better way, cloud computing. A key benefit of the cloud model, that is often overlooked, is how cloud computing can help to ensure business continuity and speed disaster recovery. Cloud computing presents a low-cost disaster recovery and business continuity solution for small and midsize businesses and a more cost-effective alternative to cost-conscious larger corporations.
Traditional disaster recovery and business continuity methods can be cumbersome and extremely expensive. A lot of companies today don’t have good disaster recovery mechanisms in place, especially SMBs.
The cloud computing solution offers most businesses an elegant, simple, cost-effective solution for rapid disaster recovery and business continuity assurance. It eliminates the need for buying and maintaining duplicate hardware and software, so there’s no costly capital outlay required.
This all means that businesses can get up and running quicker. In fact, if those businesses also have staff who aren’t directly affected by the floods and they can work from home temporarily with an Internet connection, they have access to the email, files or CRM solution they can keep in touch with their customers and provide continuous service.
We recommend that you have the following just like the basics:
- Gmail from Google
- CRM from Salesforce
- File storage from Google or Dropbox
- Web hosting from Fasthosts
- VOIP & video conferencing from Skype
