Go back to the start on cloud continuity

Ian Masters says cloud partners need to work from first principles

Cloud computing is spreading across the IT industry. Services based on monthly billing and usage-based pricing are now common for everything from email and collaboration to business intelligence (BI). Business continuity is no exception, as offerings including online storage and complete ‘recovery in the cloud' services are now available via the channel.

When selling services connected to a critical function like business continuity, customers need to trust you. For instance, many organisations will ask what happens in the event of a failure at their provider, due perhaps to a technical problem or the company going out of business. And even with strict service level agreements (SLAs), some will not sign up.

The channel can propose another way to get the benefits of cloud while avoiding issues of availability: running primary systems in the cloud. This solves a lot of the issues with moving to cloud for disaster recovery. The likes of Salesforce.com already host critical data for hundreds of companies.

If customers use a service provider's cloud to host their primary applications, they should be able to achieve availability of the same quality or even quality that is higher than it would be on site. In the event of any failure, users would be transferred to secondary servers hosted in their own datacentre. Essentially, they would be using their existing hardware, storage and networks – just as they always had.

With real-time replication of the information between customers and the cloud service provider, the customers' own datacentre will support the work when something goes wrong.

In the event of a network connection failure, employees can carry on using their own apps with up-to-date information. They may not be able to access the internet, but this should not stop them working on other activities.

This model also suits organisations based in the UK, rather than the large-scale public cloud providers. While public cloud services may be cheaper to access, customers don't have control over what happens to their data at the back end.

They can also avoid latency issues between one datacentre and another, which occur when facilities are located at some distance from each other. Being close to the customer matters from a technical standpoint as well as from a relationship point of view.

For cloud service providers based in the UK, different models can work when offering business continuity services, and further steps can be taken to develop trust before prospects sign up.

I believe that reciprocal arrangements to provide additional backup and recovery space are already being considered across the channel as partners look to protect their own installations as well as their customers.

This can be built into the contract with the customer from the start. It requires that all the necessary workloads and data can be replicated independently from the underlying servers and storage of each customer and provider.

Organisations considering how to offer cloud services to their customers must consider whether they can sell continuity services, and how they can protect their own established set-up. Plan effectively, and look at new models for providing services, as well as building trust in potential customers.

Ian Masters is sales director of UK and Ireland at Vision Solutions