I was recently working with one of my not-for-profit/ngo clients on disaster recovery and business continuity.  It reminded me why cloud-based services are so important and is a reason I often overlook when helping clients move to cloud-based services. If you want to know some other reasons for going cloud - read this articlE.

 

The biggest and most important reason is business continuity (or the older disaster recovery terminology). 

 

Firstly what is business continuity, at its core it's the ability for your organisation to recovery and continues working in the face of a disaster. In the not too distant past, this was considered the responsibility of the IT department, but the reality is that IT is just a small fraction of business continuity, yet plays a vital role. And the whole organisation has to be across BCP and implementing it. 

 

Since this is a technology blog, I'll focus on the technology side. Although some non-IT tips abound here as well.

 

 

RPO - recovery point objective - in essence, how much data are you prepared to lose. If no data is your answer, this can get very expensive or possibly not. If 24hrs of data or even a week of data, then costs to ensure your RPO is meet can go down considerably

RTO - recovery time objective - how quickly can we recover and have our data back in a place. The shorter the RTO typically the more expensive the solutions. 

 

For large organisations, having an RPO/RTO measured in seconds to minutes, means they will be investing hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to achieve this, as the technologies involved can be complex and expensive and involve having data replicated instantly between primary datacentres and backup data centres and then making sure it all works and is tested on a regular basis. For most NFP/NGO organisations, this was simply not attainable, it is cost prohibitive and they don't have the technology people resources to pull this off, that is until very recently.

 

The number 1 reason to consider moving any and all your applications and services to the cloud is business continuity. 

Imagine if your;

just to name a few, were all in the cloud. You would be able to access them from anywhere on the planet, as long as you have an internet connection.

Now imagine your current office building was demolished in a freak storm, gas explosion, flood etc. Yet all your IT systems were still available to you and in the short term your employees could work from home and now your BCP plan is just focussed on reestablishing a new office, you would be 100% ahead of 90% of most organisations.

Don't imagine it