Cloud computing and business continuity

Data is a fragile thing and poses a major Achilles heel to any business. Consequently, we're always looking for ways to better safeguard data. One idea that's been gaining considerable traction lately is cloud computing - the placing of processes and data onto the Internet. This means that a disaster at your site won't affect your IT operation and you can quickly resume business if you can gain Internet access.

However, as with any new technology, we still don't fully understand the risks of cloud computing and may well be exchanging one set of problems for another. This morning Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) service failed, bringing down a whole lot of businesses and services that use EC2. Apparently, EC2 is run out of a single data center in Virginia.

The lesson here is that you need to know whether your backup plan has its own backup. Have you just created a situation where you now have to worry about disasters in two locations? You should demand at least the same level of backup at the vendor site that you would have put in place at your site. After all, trying to mitigate disaster by adding a single point of failure to your backup plan doesn't really make sense, does it?

Comments

[Mehrdad Saberi]

Business history illustrates that giving up control of your business will eventually prove detrimental therefore giving up the “production environment” of a legitimate enterprise to a “Public Cloud” simply based on brand recognition or advertising exposure will become detrimental now if Amazon and Sony’s outages are any indication, and of course suicidal after the cloud bubbles burst.

It is important to also note that there are “Private Cloud” infrastructures providing tangible solutions without taking the production control away from the business. The buyers that posses the ability to correlate their business requirement with their perspective vendor history and background in relation to the vendor offerings, will ultimately make the right decision and gain from the significant cost savings not to mention process advantages.

Since luxury cannot be commoditized, the buyer with the ability and experience to distinguish between luxury and commoditization will win in the long run.

-Mehrdad Saberi