How to create an effective strategy for business continuity

With the increasing need for fast and uninterrupted cloud services to an ever growing customer base with constantly shifting demands, the need to maintain business continuity has never been greater.

This is a company’s readiness to deliver on its key functions without disruption due to security breaches, power outages, equipment failures and other incidents. In the age of constant connectivity, any strategy for continuity has to be able to keep customers connected, as well as quickly scale to meet the ever-growing levels of supply.

More businesses are turning to cloud computing to ensure effective business continuity. If critical systems fail or critical data gets lost, business continuity planning can help to overcome such setbacks.

Backing-up and protecting your data on the cloud is a highly secure way of ensuring business continuity for your digital assets. Having your data duplicated on at least one remote server ensures recovery should data get lost, damaged or stolen.

Serverless computing supports business continuity

Serverless computing enables companies to react to the demands in the market by scaling as needed. Resources are used and adjusted as relevant and companies pay for what they use (instead of pre-buying). This allows for service providers to really focus on the relevant business functions and to develop and roll out new features. Customers can buy services as needed, choosing their own providers.

While the term “serverless” suggests there are no servers, what it actually outlines is a model of service in which set up, management and maintenance of the “behind the scenes” aspects are outsourced to external service providers.

Ensure business continuity with the cloud

Cloud computing models ensure that even if your employees cannot come into work, they can still access their applications and files from another device in another location. With cloud computing, all data is stored and processed over the internet. This facilitates remote work and business continuity in the event that something should happen to your premises or workforce.

With a cloud-based business continuity solution, enterprises are no longer tied to specific locations or devices. Remote and distributed workforces enjoy improved collaboration and availability. Should we be faced with a future pandemic or socio-economic crisis, businesses can stay up and running if they have cloud-based capabilities

Improve operational resilience with a scalable solution

The cloud makes operational resiliency easier. With true seamless connectivity and cloud-based computing, companies enjoy maximum uptime and a flexible computing solution.

As a scalable model, the cloud ensures that businesses can grow their computing capacity as their requirements change. This supports high levels of productivity and changing demands. At peak times of the day, month or year, organisations can enjoy uninterrupted computing power and storage capacity.

Improve data security

Another key benefit of cloud-based business continuity solutions is improved data security. Data backups to the cloud can happen in real-time or on a fixed schedule. This can be automated to ensure high levels of business continuity and disaster planning. Cloud-based business continuity is more reliable because of low levels of data corruption; it's easy to restore and recover data stored in the cloud.

There are many reasons why a move to the cloud is a convincing one. Aside from efficiency, flexibility and cost, there is the crucial aspect of minimal disruption during backups or system failures. Equipment and maintenance is outsourced, which means that resources and expertise are allocated to keeping things effectively running at all times.

Downtime is reduced, recovery time is faster and security management is far more rigorous than if the servers were managed on site. The need to travel to sites in difficult or remote places is eliminated, as well as the need to sync software on several sites, if a company has more than one.

For all of these reasons, the shift to the cloud is beneficial for business. Only 35% of people in the tech field are not using serverless technology. In an era of innovation and agility, it offers the end customer what it needs - better service, faster and cheaper.

Establish business continuity for cloud services

While public cloud service providers offer high levels of federal and cyber security, it's still prudent to consider business continuity for your cloud service provider. It is possible that they lose data or experience a large-scale distributed denial of services (DDoS) attack, or they may simply go out of business.

Ensure that the service level agreements (SLAs) with your cloud service provider stipulates the quality of service. They should include details of minimum levels of uptime, the security and privacy of your data, the infrastructure and security standards that they are accountable for, as well as expected performance and computing power. If services are interrupted, the cloud service provider should pay compensation.

Business continuity on-site and off

Having a backup of critical data and intellectual property on a secure on-premises server will boost business continuity. In the event that a remote cloud provider incurs a major security breach or loss of data, your most critical digital assets need to be backed up somewhere. Businesses can distribute risk with cloud-based business continuity model that also includes on-premise back ups if required.

This hybrid environment incorporates redundancies that ensure business continuity. SEACOM Business offers various cloud computing services to large enterprises and SMEs in South Africa. For more information or to get a quote for our cloud solutions, email us at marketing@seacom.com or leave us a message.

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