Cloud Business Continuity Planning (BCP) – Harnessing Cloud Aware Applications
January 4, 2012
Another of our upcoming webinars is ‘Cloud BCP‘ – Next Generation Business Continuity Planning.
This is one of the more immediate and powerful business benefits of Cloud Computing, and also it highlights one of its most significant upcoming milestones, the shift to an era ‘Cloud Aware Applications‘.
As the name suggests this refers to applications that are now engineered for Cloud environments, rather than hardware platforms, more specifically swapping ‘PaaS’ for ‘Platform’. Rather than engineering your apps for running on a Unix XYZ for example, you now design them to run on Amazon or Azure…
There are also products that act as ‘containers’ so you don’t have to re-write them, and then also those that take further steps, like architecting them to run simultaneously across multiple data-centres and Cloud providers, like the Cloud Nines technology.
This demonstrates one of the first advantages to Cloud Aware apps is this multi-site resilience, and it headlines the key difference between ‘traditional’ BCP and Cloud BCP.
Traditional vs Cloud BCP
Traditional models of BCP are based on traditional implementations of data-centres and application technologies, most notably they are typically concentrated into one central enterprise data-centre.
This will likely have lots of in-house capacity for protecting against network and hardware failures, meaning that the organization’s Disaster Recovery plan is intended to be used if the whole data-centre itself is taken out in some form. Trying to achieve this entire data-centre migration is such a mammoth process it is fraught with numerous risks that can cause failure.
The mode of computing itself is now beginning to change and this will have associated impact on these best practices. In particular Cloud BCP is about an entirely different approach altogether. Rather than simply using a Cloud provider as one backup service for a traditional BCP program, Cloud BCP is based on a re-design of how your applications work, ie. making them Cloud Aware, via technologies like ZeroNines.
So in contrast Cloud BCP is about an approach where you reduce the likelihood of failure and also minimize the impact of it. In short as ZeroNines explains, operating applications across multiple data-centres is therefore more about Disaster Avoidance rather than Disaster Recovery.