Simon Taylor, Chairman and Co-founder, Next Generation Data

There isn’t much in the way of silver linings when clouds stop working, which they tend to do from time to time. While no doubt you will have put in place comprehensive service level agreements with your providers, these on their own cannot deliver maximum cloud cover.

In the end your cloud lives in a data centre or data centres which could be based anywhere – locally, on the other side of the country, in another country altogether. Unfortunately some of these aren’t always particularly secure or efficient and even the most diligent cloud provider cannot predict or prevent the consequences of data centre downtime caused by power outages, storm damage or security breaches.

Many cloud providers are also often reliant on third party data centres for hosting services being delivered to your business which can cause added complications. But in …