Integration of cloud computing within a business process and services-oriented architecture culture is more important than many companies have given it credit for. A good example of the importance of cloud computing integration is with the latest weather event that devastated the Northeast coast of the United States.
Superstorm Sandy came ashore in the U.S., and while many people knew it was coming it still shook the area to its very foundation. After 9 days, there are still millions with no power, no food, no heat, and struggling to find a place to stay. The devastation extends to many businesses and corporations too. A cloud computing integration that works as a part of their middleware and SOA culture would help with many aspects of rebuilding.
One question that has arisen from this type of storm that businesses around the country are taking a look at is, “How safe is our data?” Other questions then come to mind such as;
- In the wake of a disaster, how important are data backups to recovery?
- How will we bounce back after the storm?
- How sustainable is our cloud computing policy as far as disasters are concerned?
These are some of the questions policy and decision makers in businesses are struggle with in the wake of a devastating storm such as Superstorm Sandy. In light of these questions, many IT technicians, and corporate managers, are looking at these questions and seeing several benefits to cloud computing within their infrastructure and business process.
1. Cloud Computing is Beneficial as a Central Contingency
When electricity goes down there is no way for many businesses to continue to operate unless they have a generator that kicks in automatically. If not, then there are going to be a mess with many hardware and software losses. Many of the business owners were working hard to evacuate themselves to safe spots on the east coast as Sandy bore down upon them, but they also faced a bigger challenge: how to save business data, information, documents, and hardware. Having standby servers in the wake of this disaster is not enough. The outages hit them as well. Both way, data was lost and these businesses have a slim chance for recovery after the disaster.
For those companies that took the initiative within their systems architecture they fared much better through their continuity and their recovery. In fact, for businesses whose operations were purely cloud-based, continuity and recovery are not pegged on computing losses. They suffered very little, to no, losses because of their cloud integration.
2. Cloud Computing is Beneficial as a Means to Security
One of the problems that some companies face when a storm happens, power goes out, or there is a prolonged time of stalled work, is security. Security not only for the computer information, but also within the office environment itself
However, with the use of cloud computing integration companies can rest much more peacefully with the knowledge that their information is secure since this information is not kept on hard drives but on servers.
3. Cloud Computing is Not an End All Solution
Cloud computing does give tremendous benefits as far as keeping your information, your processes, and your data secure and repairable. However, it is not the only solution that you should put in place or continually build. In fact, you should continually build upon cloud computing with several contingencies in place as cloud computing is not bulletproof. However, for small businesses, cloud computing remains a solid disaster recovery tool, according to analysts.
Keeping information, data, files, and customer records secure is one of the most important aspects of a cloud computing structure. However, it is also important to keep in mind data recovery and repairability to business can resume quickly with little loss.