Keeping IT alive when disaster strikes

More recently, Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing data centre crashed and caused data losses and outages of several hours for Web sites that depended on the service like Evite, Quora, Reddit and Foursquare. These two incidents illustrate the potential opportunities and risks cloud computing brings to the world of business continuity.

The one hand

On the one hand, it gives organisations access to highly resilient infrastructures that have been built at great cost by service providers with massive economies of scale. SMEs could use cloud services for cheap offsite back-ups. However on the other, it puts control of vital business infrastructure and applications in the hands of an external service provider.

One of the primary benefits of cloud computing is that it can make high-end DR and business continuity solutions affordable to companies that could never afford to install the software and hardware themselves, says Richard Vester, executive head of Hosted Services & Solutions, Vodacom Business Services.

He adds that the recent Amazon cloud outage is unlikely to dent uptake of cloud computing. Larger organisations are likely to run private cloud infrastructures for their most mission-critical applications to put it more exactly than entrusting them to an external service provider, he adds.

Grant Hodgkinson, business development director at Mimecast SA, says companies should not assume that all cloud providers are thorough about backing up data and hosting it in a redundant way. They should quiz their service providers carefully about their disaster contingency plans and their service level agreements, he adds.