How to Ensure Business Continuity with Cloud Computing

The cloud-enabled next practice

A lot of companies today don't have good disaster recovery mechanisms in place, especially SMBs. Those that do can easily find themselves spending millions to maintain a spare set of duplicate equipment they're not actively using in production.

The cloud model represents a paradigm shift for business continuity; more than a best practice, it's actually more of a "next practice." It's a new way of approaching the problem that provides a superior, yet much simpler, strategy for solving it.

A cloud-based disaster recovery and business continuity solution is a good fit for any business with a low tolerance for downtime and data loss. Your local pool service or florist shop might be able to conduct business for as long as week (or more) without their computer systems. But most SMBs and larger businesses today are transaction-driven, data-intensive and time-sensitive operations. Many businesses and critical service providers such as hospitals cannot ever be down (or if they can, not for more than 30 seconds) and they can't tolerate data loss longer than two or three minutes.

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