Leading UK and European cloud platform outlines that a business continuity strategy must go beyond just data backups to include automated recovery, proactive monitoring and rapid failover capabilities.
Despite increasing digital risks, many SMEs continue to place their trust in data backups as the cornerstone of business continuity. Yet recent cloud outages and cyberattacks have revealed the flaw in this approach, highlighting the urgent need for more robust continuity planning and secure cloud infrastructure.
When it comes to a random software failure or oversight, or in the event of a malicious cyber event, the vulnerability of business operations quickly comes on display when continuity strategies solely rely on data backups.
“Backups are essential, but they’re no substitute for a wider continuity plan,” warns Mark Appleton, Group Lead Vendor Ecosystem Development at ALSO Group. “Data backups act as a recovery tool, and often a slow one. True resilience means enacting systems in place that can keep your business running, even when something goes wrong.”
“Failover capabilities and automated recovery options are what are currently separating reactive recovery from proactive continuity. To the businesses still relying on just manual restoration from backups during a crisis, you’re already many steps behind.
“A reliable, resilient business continuity strategy incorporates disaster recovery and intelligent monitoring at its core. It means doing everything possible to ensure downtime, should it occur, is minimised and the complexity of monitoring is reduced to be digestible to the C-suite. Individual tools work in tandem to ensure service availability is maintained in the face of even the most major of disruptions.
“Rapid failover to secondary systems or cloud environments is critical,” Appleton explains. “This keeps services live, allowing recovery to take place in the background. When every minute counts to restore operations, AI-boosted tools are even more helpful in reducing human error and accelerating restoration.”
“Currently, many SMEs are spending across multiple vendors for their monitoring, backup and recovery tool needs. However, this fails to realise that they’re ultimately duplicating efforts and costs. Bringing these capabilities together and streamlining spend through one source is another critical part of simplifying resilience planning for your organisation.”
Appleton continues by highlighting the strategic value of a holistic resiliency approach for both SMEs and MSPs alike.
“CEOs and CTOs need to ask whether their current strategy is accounting for a range of criteria, namely speed, scale and automation. Or are they only seeing baseline compliance? Similarly, MSPs have an equal responsibility in helping their clients migrate beyond basic backups to into the full-stack resilience needed for modern business continuity needs.
By integrating this into core IT strategies, they allow businesses to protect uptime and maintain end-customer needs. This isn’t just about surviving a cloud outage, but thriving through it should it occur.”
Appleton concludes: “Resilience is no longer optional or an afterthought, as it separates real competitors from businesses too far behind to even know they’ve been overtaken. Don’t wait until the next cloud outage to test your resilience. Get ahead and build it now.”