It is impossible to predict the next crisis, but one should be always be prepared for it!

So, cloud and virtualization are known as the star technologies of this decade, and business continuity specialists should justifiably be asking: “what does it really mean, and how does it affect me?”

Business continuity on demand

Getting prepared for a disaster is a simple principle of business continuity planning.

Business disruptions may impact businesses of any size (small and medium-sized businesses) in any location. From a power outage to political events or weather or even virus outbreaks, every firm needs to create its business continuity strategy to ensure its business processes continue without any trouble.

Why should one have a business continuity plan?

A plan is drafted to make sure that your business is on track, even in the event of a disaster or emergency.

Following are the conditions where your business won’t be able to operate under usual circumstances:

  • Energy or power disruption
  • Ransomware or cyberattack
  • Pandemic, emergency services, communication, safety, or transportation sector failure
  • Tornado
  • Earthquake, flood, and fire conditions

Some vital strategies that should be incorporated in your business continuity plan are cloud and virtualization.

In this technology-driven marketplace, cloud and virtualization itself are a magic combination for today’s business tycoons. This technological innovation helps leading entrepreneurs to find creative solutions to the challenges faced, such as cost-efficient utilization of IT infrastructure, flexibility in adapting to organizational changes, and responsiveness in supporting new business initiatives.

The digital transformation has a great impact on modifying the business world. Because digital transformation helps enterprises deliver rich service to consumers on any device and place at any moment. Today’s business environment needs a more agile and receptive approach toward continually shifting marketplace requirements and rapidly advancing technologies. However, cloud computing promises a more agile and effective IT environment. It allows IT to anticipate intelligently and respond to business needs and address their unique business challenges.

Let us confront the fact that we now reside in a hyperlinked planet.

Cloud computing – a new digital technology to transform business

The newest tactics in cloud computing offer greater flexibility in how to use the cloud, enhance overall business efficacy, and optimize product costs. Cloud allows remote access to networking resources, computing, and storage within a data center or via a public cloud service provider. It is nothing but the whole concept of “Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).” It is a technology that is completely transforming how companies access and store their business-critical applications and data.

The cloud plays an important role as an infrastructural element in the business continuity plan. Public cloud and private cloud can be used in this type of scenario. The public cloud helps in replicating data onto the storage system. Thus, operating servers are required in the event of a disaster, whereas private cloud offers secondary locations in normal operations that are impossible or difficult to move to the public cloud. For instance, Intel IT uses OpenStack as a platform for its private cloud to enhance service delivery with improved interoperability.

IBM uses the cloud as a source of business continuity services. For instance, IBM BCRS cloud virtualize recovery and IBM business continuity and resiliency services (BCRS) cloud managed backup are the two key services used by the company to accelerate business.

Accelerate information technology! Accelerate cloud! Accelerate your business!

Why cloud-based business continuity?

  • Easy availability in remotely located areas.
  • It can be accessed from any corner of the world.
  • Easy backup property and are cost-efficient.
  • Restoration and recovery of data can be made easily.

Peter Bookman, Founder of V3 Systems, states, “The future of cloud is in taking the concept of virtualization beyond the backing up of data or the incorporation of additional systems.”

Virtualization and business continuity

The idea of virtualization is old and has gained importance in information technology (IT) only in the last few years. Today, majority servers are virtualized. One key element of a business continuity strategy is virtualization. The technology allows business systems to recover more easily from disaster by reducing your dependence on hardware that can get antiquated or collapse.

Virtualization implies running several virtual machines inside a single physical computer. In short, it is a technique of making a virtual version of something like computer hardware. Thus, increasing the flexibility and utilization of hardware. So, we can say that virtualization is one of the major cost-efficient, energy-saving, and hardware reducing technologies used across the globe by several industry players to boost their businesses.

The technology allows sharing an application amid numerous consumers and companies at one time. The term is often identical to hardware virtualization that plays a key role in effectively providing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions for cloud computing. However, virtualization technology not only creates an environment for executing applications but also for networking, storage, and memory.

Therefore, now we can say that virtualization plays an important role in business to boost recovery time during a disaster by storing and creating images of the machines. Also, it enables you to test several disaster scenarios without affecting the daily operational processes.

Virtualization offers benefits over traditional recovery methods:

  • Quick recovery of end-user devices
  • Breaking hardware reliance
  • Exclusion of server downtime
  • Enhanced server manageability

Conclusion

To ensure security against business disasters in today’s digitally enhanced world, one needs a well-planned solution, i.e., cloud and virtualization, to help an organization create a more agile environment. Trust me, a huge part of IT is creativity, thus using new enhanced technology will help to reduce management costs and will keep you at the top of market competition.

Stay ahead of the competition with cloud and virtualization. For more such content, download our latest whitepapers on cloud and virtualization.