Winds were picking up speed and at about 80 miles per hour in some parts of the New England area as Hurricane Sandy was starting to take off in late October. In preparation for damages across the grid, Con Edison cut power in 15 states and six million homes and businesses. In a race against the clock, employees and business owners were diligently attempting to complete whatever projects they could and save their work to their companies’ server, external hard drives, and flash drives, before the storm raged over the Northeastern area of the United States. Many of these employees and business owners also saved their information to cloud computing systems, and while some of these companies are still without power, their projects, data and vital information is safe and can be recovered from this back-up solution.
Moving to Cloud Software Solutions
Websites like Gawker.com and lifehacker.com might be down from the storm, but as long as their information is safe in a cloud server the site will be available again as soon as the storm has cleared and the server is back up. Other cloud solutions that work tangentially and offer easy organization assistance for businesses can also be of help in times of disaster recovery. For example, resource utilization and advanced resource management at Netsuite.com helps you to manage and organize the projects you save to the cloud.
Not Storm-Proof, But Getting There
CIO of General Services Administration (GSA), Casey Coleman, said that their systems remained operational during the storm all because of cloud computing. Even though Verizon was experiencing an outage during hurricane Sandy, the GSA was able to use their phones, internet and have the ability to collaborate on projects and save data to their server. Having a solid infrastructure in place is helpful for agencies that are first responders, like the GSA and a storm is the perfect motivator to achieve a stronger cloud system. Hopefully, one day the same data recovery system that is used by these agencies will be available for other individual and company use, but until then, we will have to take our chances with Amazon.com’s cloud, which has been spotty as of late.
Workplace of the Future
While it’s true that other companies, sites, and freelancers might not have access to some of the data protection infrastructures that larger government agencies have. The fact that the technology exists and can function despite large destructive storms, like the recent one that much of the eastern U.S. experienced, gives hope for many that cloud computing can only improve. Cloud computing can grow into becoming the all-in-one workplace of the future; a place where a business owner can communicate with employees, work on projects and access information pertaining to his company, in the midst of disaster from anywhere in the world. When the rain, hail, snow, sleet and floods come in, don’t worry, you can choose a cloud computing solution to maintain your website and data recovery needs.
By Ryan Wilson