By Adir Cohen, CEO of CaaB (Cloud as a Business)
Embracing the cloud has brought you speed, scalability, security, and lower cost, but what happens when catastrophe – disasters, outages, breaches, or even employee blunders – crashes the party? Will the resulting impact on your data and other IT assets cripple your business, or will you remain up and running? Are you covered?
Cloud Redundancy Is Your Fallback
As the term suggests, redundancy means your data stored in the cloud is duplicated or backed-up, enabling you to immediately retrieve or access that information should your cloud service be compromised. Indeed, if you want to avoid financial losses and achieve business continuity, cloud redundancy is essential.
Unlike traditional server hosting, cloud enables you to protect yourself when disruptive events occur by implementing redundancy via several techniques. For example, you can:
- Place your servers in multiple data centers so that if your server, say in Santa Clara, California, data center goes down, your “redundant” server in Dallas can step up.
- Deploy an appropriate infrastructure or system that can monitor servers so that if one is impacted, it can be removed from the group of active servers until it can be restored. This technique also enables clients looking to access their data to be directed to one of the active servers, not the ones that are powered off.
- For those taking a multi-cloud approach, ensure that, should an outage occur, systems from various cloud vendors can work seamlessly.
- Regularly perform data backups so you are not caught unawares if an outage occurs and you can’t access your data. Cloud is a great storage idea but nothing is perfect.
Why Cloud IaaS Provides an Effective Redundancy Solution
The cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) model — cloud computing that delivers virtualized computing resources over the Internet — is an effective redundancy solution. Moreover, IaaS providers often specialize in, and include, disaster recovery in their offerings. Because the easy-to-set-up cloud IaaS hosts websites and virtual servers in multiple physical servers away from the business location, it provides security redundancy and ongoing online function. There is no single point of failure.
A Cloud Infrastructure with Built-in Redundancy
When it comes to redundancy, cloud customers are better served by a global cloud infrastructure network that has multiple data centers across multiple continents, and direct “pipes” to the data center for real-time connectivity, backup, and redundancy.
With most cloud service providers, if something goes wrong with the physical server, it won’t power on automatically, but will need to be reconfigured or powered manually. Organizations need a cloud services provider that offers redundancy and high-availability in every component of the infrastructure, including servers and storage; and all servers running on centralized storage – not on local storage where some providers run their services. This means that no matter what happens to the physical server, organizations retain continuity in the infrastructure without interference unless physical server goes down – and it then automatically runs on cycle fix.
A cloud services provider whose infrastructure is fully redundant can provide organizations with:
- A guarantee of more than the standard 99.999% (and even up to 100%) uptime. This means being able to work with – and manage everything – using one provider with one console and one interface instead of working with multiple providers.
- Redundancy available in data centers that aren’t all in the same physical location. Whether they’re in Frankfurt, London, or Amsterdam, redundancy works as if all data centers were part of the same network – if one location goes down redundancy and backup still work automatically
The beauty of it is, even if an outage does occur, the end user experiences little or no downtime and will probably not even know what’s going on, everything is taken care of automatically.
Next time a disruptive event – natural or technological – occurs, will your organization maintain data integrity and continue its business activities uninterrupted? With cloud redundancy, you’re covered.
Adir Cohen is CEO of CaaB, a cloud-solution provider allowing any MSP, VAR, or hosting company to deliver white-labeled cloud offerings to their customers within a day.
