In one of my earlier articles – “Disaster Recovery Strategies,” I talked about cold, warm and hot sites and the pros and cons of each. While financially justifying a DR investment has always been a major challenge, especially when you’re trying to convince people to spend money on something they hoped they’d never have to use, with cloud-based products, costs drop dramatically.
Planning a disaster recovery and business continuity solution is – so much easier today, from risk analysis to implementation time. You still need assess all the “what ifs.” What if you have a flood (and as I write this, they are predicting high flood levels here again because of all the snow up North this winter), a fire, an earthquake or a severe wind storm? We had a wind storm in St. Louis a few years back that took out thousands of trees and cut power to a large portion of the metropolitan area for a week. What if a disgruntled employee sabotaged your account receivables?
So you’ve exposed risk – what next? You need to have a plan to mitigate those risks. How likely are each and what impact will they have your business? Even in a cloud solution, if your business is critically impacted by being down for even a few minutes, you might still consider ‘hot’ in the cold, warm & hot solution, for that specific aspect of your business.
Dealing with natural disasters is – the sweet spot for cloud solutions. For those risks that aren’t critical in nature, why build out a cold or warm solution, when you can take advantage of others work and infrastructure? Cloud based solutions allow you to redirect that DR investment to what you do best – drive your business.
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