The Cloud is Central To Your Business Continuity Planning

Take a moment to think about how many of your business’s operations depend on the availability of its servers and applications. Many business owners and executives find it challenging to think of a single operation that doesn’t depend directly or indirectly on connectivity, computation, and data storage. Your business is a digital business: even if it doesn’t create digital products, it depends on data and applications for organization and communication. Any disruption to application and service availability impacts productivity. A large disruption could bring business to a standstill and impact the bottom line.

Business continuity planning is all about developing and implementing contingencies to make sure that doesn’t happen. Data backups to offsite locations are an important component of business continuity planning, but data is inert without infrastructure to run applications and services. The flexibility of private and public cloud platforms make them an increasingly popular component of enterprise business continuity planning.

Cloud platforms provide an inexpensive, flexible, and scalable alternative to dedicated hardware for business continuity planning.

Recover faster: Given constrained IT budgets, it is not feasible to replicate the entirety of a business’s infrastructure in multiple locations. But the flexibility of cloud infrastructure means that, with adequate preparation, businesses can spin up cloud servers to fill any infrastructure gap caused by an outage. That’s true of both private and public cloud platforms, which can quickly be repurposed to meet the business’s needs during an incident, reducing recovery times to minutes in many scenarios.

Cut costs without reducing reliability: The on-demand, pay-as-you-go nature of the public cloud allows companies to deploy servers as and when they’re needed rather than maintaining idle servers just in case. For sensitive workloads and applications, private cloud platforms offer a single-tenant server hosting environment while maintaining all the flexibility of the public cloud.

Infrastructure that evolves with the needs of the business: Businesses change, and, to remain effective, business continuity plans must evolve in parallel. The flexibility and agility of cloud platforms make them easier to retool and modify than dedicated hardware, ensuring that redundant infrastructure tracks the real needs of the business.

Choosing the right infrastructure for your business

The cloud is an excellent resource for business continuity planning, but the majority of cloud vendors provide only basic building blocks from which a business continuity infrastructure plan might be constructed. They do little to help businesses plan, select the right infrastructure, and build their public or private cloud deployment.

Steadfast Simplicity Clouds are different, providing infrastructure solutions to help businesses use of public, private, and hybrid cloud environments effectively.

Our team of infrastructure engineers works closely with clients to design and deploy custom managed infrastructure suitable for their specific needs. We have world-class data center facilities throughout the US. All of our cloud infrastructure includes a 99.99% Total Availability Service Level Agreement and a one-hour response SLA for support requests.

We also provide a range of managed security bundles, including a Core Bundle that includes firewalls, vulnerability scanning, identity and access management, and more. Our PCI DSS, FISMA, and HIPAA Security Bundles are ideal for businesses that need their business continuity infrastructure to comply with specific regulatory frameworks.

If you want to learn more about working with Steadfast to build a rock solid business continuity plan for your business, get in touch today.