How the Cloud can Make your Business Disaster Proof

When we think of disaster, we think of floods, malware, hacks, tornadoes, hurricanes… really major disasters. We think of servers that fail because they were poorly maintained. We think of an entire office catching fire. The odds of these things happening are not very good. But the human element of disaster is much more frequent. In fact, human error is the leading cause of business disaster (47%). Whether it’s a disgruntled employee, an honest mistake, or something else – the odds are good that one of your employees does something to cause a major service failure. Avoiding downtime is critical when this happens – but how can you do that? By far, the best way to ensure that your business is disaster proof is with a business continuity solution or cloud move. Here’s how the cloud can make your business disaster proof:

1. Hosted e-mail
   When your e-mail is hosted in the cloud rather than on your local server, you guarantee that you have access to it no matter what happens, as long as you have an internet connection. This allows your team to communicate with each other and your clients and customers throughout a disaster from any machine, anywhere.
2. Cloud-based applications
   If you’re using a self-hosted application or local program and that local piece of hardware goes down for any reason, you won’t be able to access it during that disaster. Cloud-hosted applications, however, are hosted in a co-location facility that has backup locations in different areas. The benefit to this is that whether you get infected with cryptolocker on your local network or a storm comes out and wipes your entire office in a flood, you’ll still be able to use your application and service clients from anywhere without relying on your office space or workstations.
3. Cloud-based data storage
   If your server is down and your store your data locally, good luck accessing it if something happens. Even if you back up regularly, you can’t guarantee that you’ll have the latest backup and won’t lose at least part of your data. When you host your data in the cloud, like your software application, it will always be available – no matter what happens to your server, office or anything else. Services like OneDrive, Box and Google Drive are just a few collaborative cloud-based data storage solutions that allow employees to access data from anywhere.
4. No backup and recovery
   Backup and recovery is extremely time consuming and almost always results in the loss of a certain amount of data. When your business operates and lives in the cloud, you don’t have to pay for expensive backup hardware and software along with off-site hosting fees to keep it safe. Your data is always live in the cloud at all times and protected against any regional or even national disaster.

Howl long can your organization afford to be down for? An hour? A day? A week? A month? How much money will you lose in that time? How many hours or days until you have to shut down? The statistics surrounding small businesses and disaster are not stacked well for those that don’t have some sort of backup or business continuity solution. Make sure that the option that you’ve selected for your business aligns well with the business impact analysis of disasters.