How to Leverage the Cloud for Business Continuity

Business continuity has been an issue at the forefront of the minds of many companies, especially in light of recent weather disasters like Superstorm Sandy. It was also the subject of a panel at the Cloud4SMB Expo in Las Vegas, Nev.

The panel was moderated by Larry Lisser (News - Alert), principal at Embrase, and featured expert speakers Dave Zahn, senior vice president at TelePacific, and Joel Maloff, vice president of channel development for Phone (News - Alert).com and an adjunct professor at CTU, specializing in business continuity.

Lisser pointed out that, even though the topic has been around for a while, business continuity (BC) is a subject that is coming to prominence for SMBs – even if the term itself is somewhat muddy. Zahn stated that, when talking to companies, it usually refers to uptime, and TelePacific reps are talking to companies about outage-oriented topics and routing calls to other avenues. But BC is not exclusive to disasters, but rather is an issue of day-to-day connectivity.


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Zahn discussed the fact that business continuity services were considered an “insurance plan,” guarding against problems that could occur, from cuts to fiber to fires in buildings and a host of other issues. Maloff added that, when thinking about BC, we often consider only technology, when really we need to be considering the business. For example, causes like localized flooding due to sprinkler malfunctions are far more common than a hurricane.

When it comes down to brass tax, large enterprises can absorb outages far better than SMBs, so smaller companies really need to keep these issues in mind. Moving BC to the cloud prevents a single point of failure, giving SMBs better peace of mind for their business continuity solutions.

Smaller businesses, according to Zahn, don’t always do the math to see how much impact an outage would have on the bottom line. He emphasized that there are a range of options available in terms of cost, so SMBs have a certain amount of flexibility.

Business continuity covers a range of services, from voice to data and quite a bit more. Zahn stated that companies are seeking out space in secure data centers as part of a business continuity plan, in essence using a private cloud model.

Maloff talked about disaster-recovery-as-a-service, which is an industry that is currently focused on data alone, not people (where do they work when the office is flooded?). Voice communications is another area that is ignored by this industry. Maloff stated that each SMB must develop its own plan. Those companies know their business the best, and therefore are better suited than vendors to make the important decisions about DR and BC.