Optimize business continuity with cloud services

Business continuity is intended to ensure that companies can maintain or continue their operations even in emergency situations. This requires both developing strategies in advance to minimize possible risks and establishing predefined processes and concrete measures that take effect in an emergency. It is thus advisable to address business continuity holistically, create a business continuity plan and specifically include disaster recovery. This allows damage to be minimized and existential threats to be avoided.

Creating a business continuity plan

All business-critical processes are specified in the business continuity plan, while suitable processes and procedures are defined to minimize interruptions and damage. In addition, the measures required to ensure the restart of operations as quickly and smoothly as possible after a potential failure are precisely regulated.

For this purpose, maximum tolerable downtimes and specific procedures for the restart process should be defined for each process, depending on their business relevance. These measures vary, of course, depending on the nature of the emergency or the cause of the business interruption. After all, the response to a natural disaster is different from that to the departure of personnel. It is also a good idea to conduct regular drills and tests for the emergency plans and associated procedures. Doing so helps companies establish a certain basic routine. This gives everyone involved the confidence that they are well prepared for a possible emergency and capable of taking the right actions.

Business continuity measures for restarting operations

The restart of operations can be roughly divided into the following phases, for each of which specific measures should apply:

• Urgent measures
• Measures for starting the emergency mode
• Emergency operations
• Transition from emergency operations back to normal operations
• Follow-up on the individual incident that triggered the emergency

Risk assessment as the basis for business continuity management

The following overview helps companies identify and assess potential risks and set up suitable emergency processes to ensure business continuity. The BSI (German Federal Office for Information Security) has published a detailed list of other elementary threat situations.

• Naturkatastrophen
  • High water/floods
  • Earthquakes
  • Storms
• Building failure
  • Fire
  • Power outage
• IT resource failure
  • Hardware
  • Software
  • Network/infrastructure
  • IT processes
•  Cyberangriffe
  • Malware
  • Ransomware
  • DDoS
• Personnel-related
  • Change in personnel
  • Service provider default
  • Partner default

The use of cloud services has now become established in almost all companies and industries, since the cloud can make IT-supported business processes more flexible. Although the main reason for using the cloud is to save costs, the use of cloud services also automatically makes IT resources and digitalized business processes more fail-safe and available.

The cloud not only helps ensure the redundancy of individual systems, data and processes, companies can also leverage cloud services to build up geo-redundancies and thus make targeted preparations for a crisis. It thus makes sense to actively include cloud services as part of business continuity and leverage them for contingency planning.

Cloud as failover

One of the most important security-related aspects is the system landscape. After all, having resilient and secure applications and data available at all times is more important than ever in the digital age. Redundancy is essential in this context. This means holding additional resources in reserve in the event of a failure of the primary instance. If companies do not want to operate their systems in the cloud at all or not completely, they should at least have a failover strategy to the cloud. This effectively protects companies from major damage in the event of IT failures at their own site.

Leveraging know-how from experts

Although most companies are aware of the increased risk of IT failures, small and medium-sized companies in particular find it very difficult to make the necessary personnel and financial investment on their own. They can nevertheless transfer at least part of this responsibility by moving their applications to the cloud.

Providers take over the complete operation and maintenance of a company’s IT resources in the cloud. Using the cloud can be more cost-effective than in-house operation, while avoiding the risks involved with infrastructures and IT resources that are not optimally maintained. Cloud providers can also provide companies with advice on appropriate protective strategies as well as backup and recovery solutions, and implement them in consultation with the customer.

Disaster recovery as a cloud service

Companies that want to go one step further can opt for disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) in the cloud. DRaaS complements cloud data protection with the capability of quickly restoring backed-up data or applications after an incident. This holds true even if a company still runs most of its business-critical applications in its own data center. As an additional location, the cloud once again offers increased availability, since outsourcing data, applications and services to a cloud provider results in high availability times and fast recovery times.

Since data recovery processes can also be tested very easily in advance in the cloud without impairing the production instance, companies are well prepared in the event of an actual damage event. If an emergency really does occur, all the necessary resources are available. Companies can also restore operations immediately if desired thanks to easy-to-use self-service tools. This minimizes downtime very efficiently while reducing sales losses to a minimum.

Don’t leave the availability of your business-critical data and applications up to chance: we would be pleased to advise you on leveraging the cloud for your business continuity.