Going to the Cloud to Reduce Risk
There are a lot of articles covering the issues around risk and going to the cloud. I'd like to start with the premise that, for the most part, the Cloud (as far as the top tier providers go) is likely as secure or more secure than your own data centers. That being said, I've seen a significant uptick in companies pursuing a Cloud strategy that is specifically targeting the reduction of risk.
More and more, I am seeing customers look to Cloud services, such as those offered by the big three "hyper-scalers", to provide the necessary redundancy and capacity to more effectively manage enterprise resilience, disaster recovery, and business continuity. In my former life, I spend a lot of time providing professional consulting in the areas of risk reduction and mitigation. At that time, it was only the most well-funded and mission-critical programs that could afford real-time data "mirroring" or some other kind of high availability IT redundancy. Today, the scalability and cost effectiveness of Cloud solutions is providing IT and Risk Management teams with a much more effective and efficient option to their traditional IT Disaster Recovery models.
For some, this is their first foray into the Cloud and the business case can be compelling. Providing your organization with the means to more effectively restore business functionality in times of crisis has always been critical, but now it is actually financially achievable, given the cost-effectiveness of the Cloud.
Ok, so you are still not convinced that the Cloud is right for you and your enterprise resilience programs? Consider taking the Cloud for a test-drive with some of your less critical business needs. Over the past several years, I have seen clients, with significant on-premise data centers, quickly running out of capacity and looking at very expensive build-outs of new data centers to address the gap. The digitization of everything has totally consumed on-prem data centers. What about moving your old records, data, and emails to the Cloud in order to meet your records management requirements? These items tend to be less "sensitive" than your more current business data. Moving older data to the Cloud not only provides for cost effective storage of that specific data, but also frees-up capacity in your data center for the new data, eliminating the need to build additional, on-prem capacity. Give it a try, you'll like it.
