Japan is still recovering from the huge earthquakes that shatter many parts of the country, followed by a horrifying tsunami, a potential nuclear meltdown and a volcano eruption. However, regardless how bad the aftermath is, the show must go on – businesses need to pick up the pieces and carry on with their activities because they must to do so; otherwise, Japanese economy – and global economy – will suffer.
When disaster strikes, businesses with better preparations will recover the fastest. Those that adopt cloud computing survives better than the rest – how so? What about the data in the broken company servers? Even multiple backups won’t help you when your servers are drowned in a tsunami or buried under building rubble.
Tony Bradley of PC World offers some practical tips on how cloud solutions can help your business to recover quickly:
1. Cloud servers
Having your servers in the cloud, such as those offered by Rackspace Hosting, means that your data is made redundant and stored in many places, away from disaster location.
2. Cloud applications
Businesses using cloud apps, such as Google Apps, can get work done from virtually any part of the world. You can still work and stay productive even without your laptops and without having you to work in an office space.
3. Cloud storage
No more worries of your lost data inside your broken laptops. Storing your data online with cloud storage solutions, such as Box.net, means your data is stored in the cloud, which duplicates are stored in multiple servers to ensure the data safety.
4. Cloud backup
Having your IT systems backed up in the cloud means you can quickly reload and rebuild from the backup and resume business operations as soon as possible, minimizing downtime.
Every good thing always comes with bad thing; be sure you know what you are doing with the cloud solutions – consider the cloud security and privacy issues, as the cloud is probably not the safest environment of all.
