We must remember that a disaster is an event or chain of events that results in a company’s inability to provide critical business functions for a period of time. It may also cause the company to move from using SOP(standard operating procedure) to employing its disaster recovery plan, potentially at another facility.
I was recently reading the article When Disaster Thunders Through the Cloud at CFO.com and it got me thinking about disaster recovery planning and the cloud as a tool.
A business interruption is any event, whether planned or unplanned, that disrupts the normal course of operations—which, if not addressed within a predetermined amount of time, may turn into a disaster.
Although your cloud provider might be able to prevent major disasters from occurring, can it prevent business interruptions? And can these interruptions turn into a disaster?
One of the points I’d like to make is, “How can we SaaS-ify our apps?” SaaS is a dominant service within cloud computing. In my opinion, it’s the service we should be providing to our end-users, using our own private cloud, or even perhaps leveraging a public cloud—if we can ensure we can survive disasters and business interruptions. Remember, divorce is expensive in the cloud, just like in real life!
From a technologist point of view, I think Cloud Computing really means thinking in terms of redundancy—not performance, reliability, or availability.
Has there been an instance where you’ve had your business interrupted due to a ‘disaster’? Did you have a DR plan? Did it include the Cloud? We’d love to know your experience.
Comments
I can see the value in doing this and have recommended to customers that they also consider “cloud options” in their planning.
But, it’s not just about the technology used to do it and it’s one of the most common flaws I see in DR activities with customers.
Before we get to making recommendations about what technology/infrastructure to use, we’d better have a good handle on;
1. The connection to organizational impact;
2. Priority and order of restoration activities associated with that;
3. AND a good assessment of the relevant risks.
These are all a critical part of the foundation required to operate a successful DR program.