In our opinion, yes. In addition, cloud services are also the most cost-effective way to protect your business from disaster.
When it comes to IT, there are two kinds of risks. One involves system failures, whether they’re caused by hardware, software, human error, or natural disaster. Minimizing these risks is called business continuity planning. The other involves the damage to your business caused by lost or corrupted data. Limiting the damage and restoring operations quickly is called disaster recovery. Business continuity and disaster recovery go hand in hand — and cloud services offer an effective, economical way for small and midsize businesses to implement them both.
Cloud service providers can leverage economies of scale to deliver a range of affordable best practices for business continuity and disaster recovery:
| • | Complete and secure IT infrastructure hosting |
| • | Around-the-clock staffing |
| • | Spare routers, switches, and servers on the premises |
| • | Redundant Internet connections, power sources, and environmental controls |
| • | Continuous offsite backups |
| • | Automatic failover to another location if the primary computer network goes down |
| • | Delivery of on-demand cloud services through virtualization |
In fact, in helping clients reduce their risk of network failure, we’ve often found that moving systems to the cloud is more cost-effective than setting up the primary network to “fail over” to another local location.
Preparing for the worst can be complicated. On the other hand, failing to prepare can cost you your business. If assessing and mitigating your risk is a challenge, please contact us or call us at (510) 272-4701. We can help you sort out your options and develop a cost-effective business continuity and disaster recovery plan.