Hurricane Sandy brought with it a heavy dose of disaster, but utilizing the cloud helped mitigate what could have been even more difficulties faced by businesses.
\n\u201cOverall, I think cloud does help,\u201d said Stephanie Balaouras, an analyst at Forrester Research. \u201cTier one cloud and SaaS providers such as Google and Amazon operate their cloud services from multiple data centers and can simply shift workloads to other locations as needed. They are also able to deliver a level of availability that many organizations could never achieve themselves. This includes the resiliency of the data center infrastructure itself to the resources that they invest in high availability and disaster recovery capabilities,\u201d Balaouras said, according to an article on SearchCloudSecurity.com.
\n\u201cCloud computing can absolutely help in BC\/DR operations,\u201d said Kevin O\u2019Shea, information security practice lead at engineering, construction and technical services firm URS Corporation. \u201cFor example, we saw several large webhost providers switch to alternate locations when their primary data centers went offline in New York City. However, businesses must be organized in such a way as to be able to offload critical applications and data to a cloud provider,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n