intelligent

If it ain ’ t broke , don ’ t fix it ?

However , if the cloud migration project stops there , businesses will miss out on valuable optimisation opportunities . The cloud offers a myriad of advantages , from better utilisation of computing resources to easier access and higher performance . Its elasticity allows users to seamlessly adapt to fluctuating workloads as their business requirements evolve , so for a real return on investment , organisations will want to reap all those benefits of using the cloud .

Moreover , if the migration was a pure ‘ lift and shift ’ project that prioritised speed and convenience , businesses could not only miss an opportunity to streamline their IT environment – they may also suddenly find themselves at risk of losing valuable data or suffering damaging downtime . Just like onpremises servers , the cloud doesn ’ t come with a built-in continuity guarantee .

Cloud services can experience major outages that due to their ‘ blast radius ’ have a significant impact on very large numbers of customers .

For example , in October 2021 , an outage lasting several hours hit users of Azure virtual machines and services all over the world . Users saw error messages when attempting to carry out operations such as start , create , update and delete .

These events aren ’ t rare one-off incidents , either . In December 2021 , an outage of over an hour affected Amazon ’ s own services . Enterprise customers couldn ’ t see any information on their Amazon Web Service status page . Just one week later , Azure ’ s Active Directory service went down , preventing users from signing into their Microsoft services .

Extended downtimes can be extremely damaging to businesses . Not being able to access business-critical applications and data when it ’ s needed could result in lost business , lost revenue , reputational damage or worse and even physical harm . Organisations that rely on infrastructure in the cloud must therefore ensure that they have a solid strategy for how to restore data quickly and keep operations up and running in case of a cloud service failure , a cyber incident or a ransomware attack . In fact , although not all organisations are aware of this , under Microsoft ' s shared responsibility model , customers are explicitly responsible for keeping their own data secure , protected and recoverable .

Unfortunately , the built-in data protection and recovery options offered by cloud providers are fairly limited : Azure ’ s free-of-charge , basic data redundancy backup component for instance doesn ’ t allow automated recovery and doesn ’ t store historical data . And Azure Site Recovery , which comes at an extra cost , doesn ’ t give customers the ability to recover from a backup point that is older than 72 hours .

For businesses that cannot afford to risk downtime , the best way to prevent data loss is to perform cloud backups both within Azure as well as to a separate , secure cloud . Third-party Business Continuity solutions for the cloud – such as the purpose-built Datto Continuity for Microsoft Azure – are a good solution as they offer additional security measures including ransomware protection and data deletion defences . MSPs can implement these for their customers .

What to ask of your MSP

As a general rule , businesses that have made the move to the cloud and are using Infrastructure-as-a-Service ( IaaS ) solutions such as Microsoft Azure should still expect the same level of Business Continuity they had on-premises . They shouldn ’ t be afraid to ask their migration partner exactly what measures are in place .

For example , can the MSP provide evidence of a reliable continuity strategy ? Is the strategy tested on a regular basis , for example quarterly , to ensure the backups are working as they should and services can be restored quickly ? And how does the MSP ensure your business can continue to operate even when there is a major cloud outage that lasts several hours ?

The cost of the continuity solution should be comparable to what the business previously paid for on-premises data protection . If the

Bob Petrocelli , CTO , Datto

IN ORDER TO BE SUCCESSFUL , IT IS AN ONGOING EFFORT THAT REQUIRES REGULAR REVIEWS AND CONTINUOUS OPTIMISATION .