IT resiliency means being able to undergo digital transformation while protecting your business from interruptions. The process of technological change is risky, but your company needs to evolve to stay competitive.
Your business can’t afford to lose production time or jeopardize mission-critical data because vulnerabilities have been introduced into your systems. Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC) found that a single hour of downtime cost 98% of companies $100,000 or more. Despite the potential economic impact of downtime, a shocking 72% of companies admit they can’t meet data protection requirements.
Resiliency is within the reach of every organization. Most technology savvy businesses are already leveraging the cloud. The cloud protects data and helps companies maintain seamless business continuity by keeping infrastructure current, providing data protection, and giving them an ally in the fight against business interruptions.
Here’s a closer look at 3 ways that cloud promotes resiliency:
1) Keeping Your Company Current
Best in class cloud platforms are inherently up-to-date. The cloud provider ensures that patches and upgrades are installed at the hypervisor level and below.
Having a current and fully patched infrastructure prevents cybercriminals from exploiting vulnerabilities to infiltrate your company’s systems, where they can steal and compromise data or even shut down production. An updated cloud infrastructure also reduces the chance that there will be a system failure that would result in unplanned downtime.
Working with a cloud provider takes the burden of performing upgrades and patches off your company’s IT team while still guaranteeing that systems are not left vulnerable.
2) Supporting Data Protection
Backup and disaster recovery are much easier to accomplish in the cloud. Cloud makes it possible for organizations to achieve levels of resiliency that were out of reach in the past because of cost and complexity.
Hybrid cloud offers public and private cloud environments that are orchestrated for synchronized backups. Synchronized backups reduce recovery point objectives (RPOs), lessening the amount of data loss. With hybrid cloud, the on-premises environment can instantly fail over to the public cloud, reducing recovery time objectives (RTOs).
Cloud allows companies to provision backup resources while avoiding capital expenses. A backup environment can be paid for at a predictable monthly rate. The cloud resources can easily be scaled up or down to meet changing backup capacity needs.
3) Reducing Risk
Companies that use cloud gain a partner in their pursuit of resiliency: their cloud provider. A trusted cloud provider and partner can map out ways to reduce risks and create a cloud strategy that will enhance your resiliency.
A cloud provider that takes a consultative approach will work closely with your company to assess your risk profile and then recommend the right cloud services and solutions that will promote resiliency. An ideal cloud provider will offer backup and recovery services and disaster recovery-as-a-service.
A Resilient Partnership
When choosing a cloud provider, consider the ways it can contribute to the resiliency of your business. Look for backup and recovery offerings, as well as disaster recovery capabilities, that ensure your company stays up and running even after a traumatic incident.
FirstLight offers cloud services and solutions with a focus on resiliency. Our cloud solutions deliver the geographical redundancy needed to recover data after breaches, equipment failure, or natural disasters.
Want to learn more about FirstLight Cloud Services and Solutions? Check out “Managing IT is Harder Than Ever. FirstLight’s Cloud & Managed Services Can Make it Easier” for more details.
