Leveraging the Cloud for Disasters

It is not really that surprising that regional devastation at the scale that Hurricane Sandy wrought has elevated the industry chatter concerning how cloud computing could significantly enhance an organization’s ability to survive such disasters.  Even though many companies are testing the waters of the cloud computing environment, the number of Web sites and businesses that dropped off-line during this recent calamity speaks volumes on how far many of these companies still have to go in embracing the Cloud in such a way that prevents this loss of business continuity.  Adopting the Cloud, both as a core business regimen and as business continuity strategy, requires much planning and time, as well as a distinct change in how an organization looks at its IT functions and infrastructure.

Using the Cloud as a platform (PaaS) for distributed hardware abstraction (IaaS) is the “easy” decision for most organizations, assuming that they can get by the challenges that bandwidth and security present in these changes.  The harder part of this change is adapting the software/application environment that the organization is dependent upon to run its business, since not all (few) legacy applications will operate in this environment.

This excellent article, by Tim Crawford, walks the reader through some of the initial considerations required for any organization to begin to embrace the Cloud as a viable DR/BC alternative… http://timcrawford.org/2012/11/16/how-to-leverage-the-cloud-for-disasters-like-hurricane-sandy/