There are a whole number of reasons for moving to the cloud. Simplicity. Cost savings. Flexibility. Enhanced services and capability. On their own each of these can be very compelling. But there’s another reason that’s often over looked and I think it’s more compelling than all the others – business continuity.
There are some great examples of this. There’s the story of the accounting firm in Christchurch whose offices were destroyed in the earthquake in February last year. This happened a couple of days before GST returns for all their clients were due. And because the business was built in the cloud they were able to buy a bunch of new laptops, set up a wireless network in the home of the business owner, connect to all their systems and file all the GST returns on time. This really was living the cloud dream – access to all data from anywhere using any device. All they needed in order to keep working was an internet connection.
Last week one of our Office 365 clients rang up. We had migrated their email into Office 365 but not the documents as they have been a bit busy for this. These guys were in a bit of a pickle. Their building had just been deemed an earthquake risk and they had to move out immediately. We needed to get their documents into the cloud as soon as we could so they were able to keep working.
Unfortunately we could not do the work then and there. We needed access to the files on the server and that was about to be turned off. The work around involved the client copying the data onto a USB drive and sending it back to us to work on.
No one knows when their building will be deemed to be an earthquake risk and shut down. And no one knows when a real disaster will occur. What we do know is that a business with its data stored in the cloud with geographical redundancy is going to be much better placed for business continuity than one with everything on a server in the back room.
Business continuity is a great reason to be in the cloud.
Want to know more about how your business can work in the cloud? Send me an email and we can talk!
