12-27-21 | Blog Post
These days, downtime has become a dirty word in business. Luckily, the cloud goes a long way in reducing downtime and keeping companies online. In the event of a disaster, hosting data offsite in a cloud environment guarantees its safety. Additionally, with an ultra-low latency network, your data can be recovered quickly and efficiently. With high availability solutions that offer advanced security and reliability, your business can worry less about downtime and more about getting the job done. Here are 5 ways the cloud works to keep your business online:
Your company’s data is very important to your business and needs to be protected at all times. Despite the fact that you do not own or control the systems storing your data, you are actually in better hands, security-wise, within the cloud. The cloud offers controlled access, strong perimeters, and surveillance systems to ensure the safety of your data. On top of this, you get top cyber security expertise that ensures thorough and frequent audits, to continually make the security system stronger. With the prevalence of cyber attacks on the rise, it is no longer wise to have only one copy of your data, let alone to keep that copy on-premises. The cloud works to ensure the security of your business-critical data, even in the event of a cyber attack.
When selecting a cloud service provider, it is important to make sure they are reliable and have employed redundant solutions to ensure high availability. If your provider’s main system goes down, it should have the following safety nets in place: automatic failover, servers, backup storage, security systems, and some sort of redundancy of power (i.e a generator). These safety nets increase SLA percentages, which lower the chances of the cloud provider, and ultimately you, experiencing downtime. For this reason, service providers are fighting to add an extra 9 to the end of their SLA percent (99.99999%), just to stay competitive.
The cloud gives you the ability to access your data from anywhere in the world, at any time. This mobile benefit is enabling many global businesses to stay connected from around the world. It also allows employees to work remotely if needed. Additionally, by hosting your data in a cloud environment, as opposed to building your own infrastructure, your business is not confined to the office. If you outgrow your current building, or want to move to another location, the headache is significantly reduced.
As mentioned previously, a huge benefit of using the cloud is that you can access your data at any time, in any place. The exciting part is, with a low-latency network, you can recover data fast. Seriously, we’re talking milliseconds standing between you and your data. These latency speeds become important in the event of a disaster as you fight to get your business back online before serious loss of time and revenue. The cloud makes it easy to define Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), giving you more control over downtime.
The cloud offers users a dynamic environment to perform tests and work on development, as well as offers solutions for backup and disaster recovery. With the flexibility of the cloud, businesses have many options when deploying a cloud environment, including the ability to scale environments up or down to suit data needs. With the capacity for growth and the numerous possibilities for provisioning, the cloud helps businesses stay online by reducing the time it takes to deploy new environments. Projects no longer need to be put on hold while new hardware is provisioned.
During a time when outages can mean huge financial losses for businesses, the cloud offers a competitive advantage by ensuring maximum uptime. For companies looking for high availability at an affordable price, the cloud is a great option, as it does not require extensive investment in infrastructure. Making the shift to the cloud is easy! Contact Otava to Find out more!