There are a number of reasons your company could find itself in serious trouble where its digital infrastructure is concerned. Though it’s mercifully unlikely, you still need to consider the likelihood of a major disaster impacting your normal business operations and how a private cloud computing platform could help you recover quickly.
What Is Disaster Recovery?
Hopefully, none of you will ever have firsthand knowledge of what a disaster would do to your company’s digital infrastructure. However, as the result could cripple your operations and cost you millions, it would be wise to understand what this catastrophe entails.
As the name suggests, disaster recovery involves a set of policies and practices that enable the continuation of vital technological services and systems in the case of a natural disaster or some kind of manmade calamity.
The foundation of disaster recovery is the technology systems responsible for supporting necessary business functions. This is different than the ones used for business continuity, as those would involve keeping your company’s entire virtual framework running despite major disruptive events.
Considering Time and Money Required for Sufficient Disaster Recovery
With enough money, your system can withstand any disaster without issue. However, this isn’t a realistic approach for most businesses. Instead, you need to think about how much money you can spend and what kinds of recovery time objectives are within reach. Your time objective is how long you can manage to spend on disaster recovery during the worst case scenario.
While it’s tough to think about handling such a terrible situation in objective terms, it’s required in order to make sure you have the appropriate approach.
A private cloud helps with this because you don’t need to spend as much money on your physical hosting architecture. You don’t need giant servers and the space to house them. Your budget doesn’t have to accommodate paying professionals to look after them around the clock.
As a result, you can spend some or all of this money on making sure you’re ready with the best possible disaster recovery program.
Unlimited Scalability
Another big change that private cloud disaster recovery computing brings to the table is that you can scale up with ease. Why is this important for your disaster recovery protocol?
It’s because private cloud computing will let you store massive amounts of data on a separate server that can be accessed should disaster strike. As time goes on, you’re going to need more and more space, and cloud computing allows you to scale up as necessary in the most efficient way possible.
Imagine constantly needing to add more and more physical servers to your office whenever this happens. Your company might not be able to keep up or otherwise need to cut corners, leaving you extremely vulnerable when a catastrophe occurs.
Speedy Recovery Times
With conventional disaster recovery approaches that don’t benefit from private cloud computing, recovery can take a very long time. In the duration, your company most likely won’t be able to handle any transactions at all.
Until your servers are loaded with the operating system and application software and then patched so they can work from the last configuration used in production, your data will not be fully restored.
Compare that to simply transferring your operating system, patches, data and applications to a new data center without the need to reload every component of your server and it’s easy to see which one will involve the speedier recovery from disaster.
Keep in mind, too, that best private cloud hosting services offer hosting from multiple locations that are designed to withstand natural disasters or transfer your data in the event that one overwhelms a given location. All of these are reasons why private cloud computing has changed disaster recovery for the better.