It’s safe to say that the world has had a pretty rough start to the new decade. From wildfires raging in Australia and volcanic eruptions in the Philippines to locust swarms across east Africa and, perhaps having the most widespread impact, the coronavirus pandemic.
When a disaster of any kind strikes, the last thing you want to do is worry about basic service provision. This is especially true as we all face different levels of lockdown in an effort to curb the spread of the virus. What we’ve witnessed throughout this global pandemic is that the companies that were already using the public cloud were able to adapt to lockdown circumstances far easier than their on-prem counterparts. This is because they could rely on their existing, trusted partners to keep their operations running, and they don’t have to spend time worrying about accessing their data centres remotely. These businesses can instead focus all their attention on the more strategic realities of running a business in a global environment riddled by disruption.
Playing the hand you're dealt
Many of the hurdles we face today are scenarios that none of us ever expected, and so we’ve been forced to react on the fly. This is especially true when it comes to remote work.
For a long time, companies have talked about agile ways of working, remote employees, and the mobile workforce. Some have fully embraced these trends and transformed their businesses. Most have only done so in a limited way, if at all. That is until COVID-19 came along and forced all of us to take everything – be it critical or non-critical – online. It’s a bit like we’ve all been plunged into a massive remote working experiment and there’s no option to opt out of it.
Companies of all sizes, across all industries and in countries around the world, have had to go remote. They’ve had to implement digital tools and technologies, and put the procedures and processes in place, to enable their teams to work outside the office.
This situation highlights that tomorrow is unexpected. And history proves this.
We need to think about COVID-19 as being the latest in a long line of disruptions that the world has faced at different points throughout history. And we can expect more upsets and disturbances like this in years to come. But this doesn’t mean that you should sit back and wait for disasters to happen. You must use this period to ensure your business has the agility to shift and adapt to deal with problems when they do arise.
The brands that are able to adapt – and do so faster than their competitors – are indeed being presented with an amazing opportunity. These companies must take advantage of the situation so that they can thrive and emerge from this stronger than before. If you want a successful company, you need to have the flexibility to handle curveballs like this and use the time you have now to position your brand to grow once we come out on the other side.
Defining partnerships
When selecting a cloud partner, technology is only one aspect of the game. What is even more important is how transparent your partner is. People can build their solutions and services up with good marketing – but transparency is irreplaceable. Knowing who your partner is, what they offer, how they operate, and how they deliver their services is essential.
Beyond transparency is flexibility. Your business doesn’t always fit in the same mould as everyone else’s, yet there are providers out there that are building cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all solutions, and then they try to force customers into these rigid solutions. Flexibility in approaching your specific needs is quintessential when selecting a partner.
Also, you do not have to partner with the biggest cloud provider; it is better to select a company that has the right people who are transparent and flexible in their approach. Companies will keep buying from service providers that are honest in their communication, services, capabilities, and their ability to deliver, especially when things go wrong. Nobody is immune from failure – but few will own their shortcomings and go the extra mile to fix them. That is what you need to look for in a cloud services partner.
Where disaster recovery, business continuity shine
Now is not the time to rest; now is the time to refresh your disaster recovery and business continuity plans and be ready to evolve. Using cloud computing, Disaster Recovery-as-aService (DRaaS) can boost the resilience of your entire IT systems against disasters. Today, we’re seeing how DRaaS is supporting organisations as they make plans for the future while juggling the complexities of today. This demands that we rethink our traditional understanding of disaster recovery.
Disaster Recovery has always been thought of as moving from A to B. When things are running smoothly, we’re working at point A. When disaster strikes, we make the move over to point B; with the ultimate goal to get back to point A as quickly as possible. But our current reality has thrown us into scenario C, one which few planned for and where we can’t work from site A or B.
We need to redefine our understanding of a disaster and improve our existing business continuity and security policies to better prepare for incidents like this going forward. Often, business continuity and disaster recovery plans are quite formulaic. People have a plan simply to tick a box. This global shutdown showcases a real need for us to accelerate and revisit service provision so that there’s less risk of being caught off guard again in the future.
The value of having a robust disaster recovery solution – one that accounts for a broad range of disasters – is that you don’t have to respond on the fly. It’s like having an emergency evacuation plan for your building in the event of a fire. Many have had to implement solutions and, in a hurry, just to keep going. It’s hugely important to refine and review those rushed decisions and to spend time ironing out any kinks that there may be in the “temporary” processes you’ve put in place.
Consumers are less and less forgiving about downtime. They just expect things to work. And you can bet that your customers will have no problem going to someone else if your business isn’t able to keep the lights on when disaster strikes. If you can’t deliver in a crisis, you won’t survive. You have to build a business with this in mind.
When partnering with a company to do your disaster recovery, make sure that you have a shared approach. If they’re not resilient, everything will fall down at the first hurdle. We have a very agile approach to business resilience and disaster recovery. We’ve managed 15 clouds worldwide and have delivered services through this entire crisis without any downtime or disruptions to availability. We’ve done so across many locations – from Dublin and Honolulu to Saudi Arabia and Melbourne. Because we have so many locations, across so many markets, it’s essential for us to maintain a level of consistency and continuity. HPE hardware has supported us with all the tools and equipment we need to mitigate any issues and continue our operations as usual.
Our DR tool leverages the latest cloud technologies for unparalleled scale and flexibility of deployment. Customers can mirror virtual or physical in-house infrastructure to the cloud to achieve high resilience with rapid data recovery and sync times at an affordable cost.
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