By Carol McGrotty, Head of Transformation and Operations
Cloud technology has boomed over the last few years, with hybrid working accelerating adoption significantly. In fact, Gartner estimates that by 2025 “over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, up from 30% in 2021”.
With many employees now working from anywhere, it’s never been more important to make sure your cloud infrastructure is secure. Companies cannot afford downtime affecting operations, as well as the costs that come with such disruption.
Business continuity is key. That’s why our Head of Transformation and Operations Carol McGrotty is here to lend some advice for building a more resilient cloud-based infrastructure…
Assess security measures
Security is paramount, and here at Vapour we take this very seriously to ensure our customers’ data is kept secure and safe.
Cybercrime has increased exponentially since the pandemic – with the majority of communication and operations moving online – and hackers have adopted more advanced tactics than ever before to access sensitive information.
Therefore, having a cloud-first approach to your monitoring infrastructure is crucial to achieving visibility across a hybrid organisation. Outsourcing your cloud security management to a specialist third-party, like Vapour, will strengthen protection by having the right resources in place, dedicated to securing your environment.
We can investigate and report on any part of the network for example and resolve any weak spots before it’s too late. Prevention is better than a cure, after all.
Solutions such as encryption, virtual private clouds, and cyber threat resilience testing can also better protect organisations by making it tough for hackers to infiltrate systems. And we’ve got all bases covered.
Backups are vital
Although cloud downtime is rare, it can happen. And it’s best to be prepared in case it occurs. Having a backup system in place can prevent data loss by accidental deletion, server failure, or a cyberattack, for example.
When dealing with backups, considerations should include Recovery Points Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). When there is a system outage, the RPO and RTO are two data points that can tell you the likely impact of downtime and the level of risk you need to mitigate.
RPO is a measure of how frequently you take backups. So ask yourself, if a disaster occurs between backups, can you afford to lose five minutes’ worth of data updates? Or five hours? Or a full day? RPO represents how fresh recovered data will be, or the amount of data that will be lost or need to be re-entered in the event of an outage.
Whereas RTO is the amount of downtime a business can tolerate. In a high-frequency transaction environment, seconds of being offline can represent thousands of pounds in lost revenue, while other systems – such as HR databases – can be down for hours without adversely impacting the business. The RTO answers the question - how long can it take for our system to recover after we are notified of a business disruption?
Considerations such as instant recovery, data replication and data centre presence/locality, site replication, and O365 backups all form part of resilience planning. Therefore, organisations should work with an experienced backup specialist to give them peace of mind.
At Vapour, we work with global data management leader Veeam to provide flexible and reliable cloud backup solutions.
Expect the unexpected
From natural disaster to a ransomware attack, there are several factors that can put your business under threat, so organisations need to have a strategy in place to deal with failures effectively.
In some instances, investment in a dedicated Disaster Recovery as a service (DRaaS) may be wise.
Scoping the organisations current requirements, and possible future business priorities, is key.
Implementing solutions that are smart, scalable, flexible, and ultimately secure won’t just benefit cloud resilience, it will maximise IT budgets too.
We’re proud to say that Vapour’s resilient cloud infrastructure can guarantee 99.99% uptime.
Read how Vapour powered a high-resilience disaster recovery strategy for Zest4 here.
