Ensure resilient IT systems with your cloud providers

The more complex a system is, the more ways it has of failing. Let’s look at an automobile: if a tire blows out while it’s going fast, then the car can spin out of control and crash. The same tragic outcome could happen if the brakes fail. And when a vehicle has a drained battery or fuel tank, it would become an oversized paperweight.

In a similar fashion, information systems have many potential points of failure. For example, ransomware could lock users out of their own devices. Internet connections could come to a grinding halt due to distributed denial-of-service attacks, thereby stopping online orders from coming in. And there may come a time when your old computers can no longer support today’s software, making your business fall behind in terms of productivity.

Yet despite being under severe stress or suffering adverse conditions, IT systems can still maintain essential capabilities and recover to a point wherein they can operate sufficiently, provided that the systems have the means for doing so. This is called cyber resilience.

Companies that are able to operate sooner than their competitors during debilitating situations definitely have a clear advantage — and having resilient IT systems helps tremendously in that regard.  Cloud service providers (CSPs) can make your IT systems resilient in the following ways:

1. CSPs keep their IT up to date

When businesses have come to rely on particular IT systems for a very long time, they find it very hard to shift to newer systems once their legacy ones become obsolete or expensive and time-consuming to maintain. Imagine having to replace entire fleets of PCs and suffering downtime because their operating system is no longer supported by the software publisher. Also imagine cumulatively exceeding the original cost of your computers by purchasing hard-to-find replacement parts for them, then losing productivity once you do have to perform hardware maintenance and repairs.
Thankfully, moving to the cloud means renting out IT resources, which means that the problem of IT upkeep would be the cloud provider’s concern.

2. CSPs allow you to “put your eggs in many baskets”

If a natural calamity befalls your data center and that center exclusively hosts your business apps and houses all of your sensitive data, the damage to that site could spell ruin for your organization.
Migrating your apps and data to the cloud will help you prevent such outcomes. This may make you wonder: Can’t calamities befall CSPs as well? Instead of me carrying my one basket of eggs, won’t it just be another party who’ll do the exact same thing? The answer to these are yes and no, respectively. This is because unlike an average business, a CSP has far larger IT infrastructures that grant it a much greater capacity to weather terrible situations.
In concrete terms, a cloud provider implements backup systems to safeguard the data under its stewardship and can divert operations to resources in one location if something adverse happens to the IT infrastructure in another location. In short, a CSP imparts its own resilience to its clients.

3. CSPs enable you to implement your own backup systems, business continuity plans, and disaster recovery plans

If a ransomware attack ever locks you out from your files, you can easily let those files go if you have cloud-based backups to fall back on. If that attack also renders your in-house servers inaccessible, you can still maintain basic business functions if your primary apps run in the cloud and for as long as you have an internet connection. Furthermore, those backups and apps in the cloud can help you rebuild your IT infrastructure and allow you to have a better operational posture sooner than competitors that don’t have resources in the cloud.

4. CSPs have dedicated IT staff

Providers of managed cloud services have teams of expert IT staff that secure, maintain, and fix IT systems 24/7/365. They’re able to proactively prevent problems from blowing up as well as help your IT teams tackle and resolve cloud issues more quickly than if the latter were to handle things on their own.

Companies that are able to operate sooner than their competitors during debilitating situations definitely have a clear advantage — and having resilient IT systems helps tremendously in that regard. Let SimplyClouds bring about the resilience your business needs. Schedule a FREE consultation to learn more.