Placing your computing resources in a public cloud offers remarkable advantages, liberating your business from the burdens of data backup and failover systems. However, ensuring foolproof data security demands more than this. It hinges on your cloud computing provider’s ability to furnish redundant systems across multiple geographical sites, coupled with a transparent disaster recovery strategy substantiated by successful recovery tests. Disastrous cases like the 2009 loss of T-Mobile Sidekick users’ contacts data stored in Microsoft’s Danger unit’s cloud or the 2007 deletion of Amazon EC2 virtual machine instances due to new software deployment highlight the significance of these measures (Fried, 2009; Miller, 2007).
Shielding your data from loss in public clouds necessitates strategic approaches. One viable tactic is adopting a hybrid model, reserving public clouds for non-critical business apps and data. Alternatively, employing a secondary public cloud to back up your primary one is prudent, assuming flexibility in technology adoption (details in the subsequent section). However, should you entrust critical business data to a public cloud, the onus rests on you to ensure your provider’s disaster recovery protocols withstand scrutiny. While your business can endure intermittent system disruptions, recovering from data loss can be a different story altogether. Safeguarding your data integrity is paramount for long-term business resilience.