Cloud Hosting

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Published: 31 May 2022

Data protection and business continuity offerings were once only financially accessible to large companies that could afford to construct a secondary data center. However, the public cloud and cloud hosting providers have made business continuity and disaster recovery services available to the masses.

There are numerous benefits to using the cloud for business continuity (BC). The most obvious is that on-premises workloads can be configured to fail over to the cloud, substantially reducing an organization's downtime. This enables mission-critical applications to run even if the organization experiences data center issues.

The cloud also simplifies disaster recovery (DR) planning. On-premises continuous data protection offerings can often be configured to write a backup copy to the cloud. This ensures that critical data is replicated to an off-site location where it's protected against disasters that might affect the data center. An organization could also use a cloud-based disaster recovery service, which can be a less expensive and simpler alternative to a custom cloud-based DR offering.

Organizations can use the cloud to scale workloads running on premises. During periods of peak demand, a cloud service can be configured to automatically provision additional VMs to cope with the increased workload.

Similarly, cloud services can help reduce the effect of a DoS attack. Such attacks seek to overwhelm IT resources to the point they are unable to handle normal workloads. Depending on the severity of the attack, workloads can become sluggish or completely unavailable. Because cloud services can scale to meet demand, an organization might be able to use cloud resources to reduce the effect of the attack so business can continue as normal.

Finally, business continuity in the cloud reduces recovery time in the event of a disaster by ensuring that recovery operations can be performed in a minimal amount of time.

Entire books have been written on what must be considered when planning for business continuity in the cloud. However, there are several things that must be considered above all others.

The process of creating a cloud-based BC plan will vary from one organization to the next. However, there are some high-level steps that will be common to most organizations. These steps include:

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Business continuity in the cloud: Benefits and planning tips - TechTarget