Regardless of their size or what their function is, all organizations and companies are vulnerable to the same misfortunes. There are plenty of occurrences in the modern world that are completely beyond the control of any business. Storms can strike; power can be disconnected; coffee can be spilled on a server rack. Anything can possibly go wrong, regardless of what a company is and the tools that they have in place.
There is an old adage that claims “time equals money.” Today, that has never been closer to the case. Businesses have to be fast, responsive, agile and flexible. The consumerization of IT has only made the demand for instant gratification even greater, as smartphone and tablet users are expecting to have access to what they want at whatever time they require it. As the need for speed increases, the effects of unplanned downtime become even graver, threatening to shut down many companies who falter even momentarily.
But as attention starts to turn to disaster recovery plans, many organizations are finding that their policies – often crafted in the days before the iPod was even a reality – are outdated and ineffective for current technological developments. Just maintaining an external hard drive kept behind the boss’s desk is not going to cut it anymore. Should these systems befall the same fate as the rest of an office during a fire, they will be just as worthless as the servers they were protecting. This assumes that they have even been properly backed up on a regular basis.
This is why more companies are trusting their redundancies to disaster recovery services based in the cloud. The cloud has effectively redefined what computing means. With so many people needing lots of important and personal files at any given time, endpoints like PCs are now considered less like machines for storage and more as gateways to the endless nature of the cloud.
Because of the technology’s inherent flexibility, the cloud is frequently being leveraged as a form of disaster recovery and business continuity. By making critical backups available in the cloud, companies can consider themselves prepared for almost anything.
Cloud is the present, future of disaster recovery
The greatest thing about the cloud is its ability to be accessed from all over the world, so long that there is an Internet connection. This is incredibly important should an office be rendered uninhabitable or destroyed completely.
“If your DR solution is cloud-based or otherwise designed for mobility you can have users working remotely from just about anywhere,” said Rothstein Kass consultant James Russel​l to Markets Media. “This can eliminate the need to have a ‘hot’ or ‘warm’ site ready and waiting in most cases. This can vary depending on the business type or sector, but in many cases mobility allows for employees to get back to work from just about anywhere even after a major disaster.”
But backing up files is the no-brainer part of this equation. What if computers become infected with a virus or malware, forcing them to be reimaged? All of the critical system settings that may have taken a long time to configure will all be lost, even if crucial documents have been well protected.
This is where system restore software from Faronics can be a lifesaver. The popular Deep Freeze program is now available with cloud functionality. No matter where temporary worksites need to be established, the kind of abilities enabled by Deep Freeze Cloud will keep organizations running when brick walls are suddenly placed in their paths. Bringing critical settings back is as simple as rebooting the computer.