Townsville finally got wet! With excellent downpours in our region this year, we’ve finally seen some good water reach our dam. While this is cause for celebration, for many it was a scary time. Flood water rising and approaching homes and businesses across the city.

And then only a few weeks later, Ingham was buried under an enormous amount of rainfall. Flooding was everywhere, homes and businesses isolated and inundated. We are North Queensland, and wet seasons are part of our lives, albeit not for a few years now, so we bounce back and recover. As the waters recede it’s back to business as usual.

Or is it? For some businesses the flood waters will have penetrated into their stores and shops, into the server rooms and soaked the valuable servers and network equipment that control our day to day business operations.

What’s the next step? Claim insurance, order new servers, wait for delivery and IT installation, obtain a backup to get all the files back and hope that they’re recent enough that you haven’t lost too much data? How long does all this take? Days at least…weeks? Very likely.

The last person to go out of business after a disaster is the first person to start trading again.

 

Cloud Services

Cloud services have been around for years now. We all seem to have a pretty reasonable grasp on what it is, what it means. But what we don’t have is a good understanding of just how powerful it can be for running your whole of business. Particularly now that faster internet is at our fingertips. Even your mobile data services can now reach incredible speeds, and data allowances for mobile products (including mobile internet) are more and more generous.

 

Traditional versus Cloud

Depending on the size and industry of your business, you will have a local device that controls your user logins, hosts your emails, stores your data, and runs your business software. Here are some of the ways that Microsoft Azure runs these basic business services.

Azure Active Directory
Your login accounts used to be controlled by an Active Directory Server. This can now be run simply and effectively in the cloud. Log in with your email address, and control your policies using a mobile app.

Office 365
Emails are already shifting to the cloud. Services like Office 365 are excellent and affordable hosts for your business emails. Office 365 uses Azure Active Directory as its back end.

Microsoft Azure Storage
Microsoft Azure provides an easy and affordable way to have file storage hosted in the cloud. The cloud storage looks and feels just like a local hard drive, but your data is safe online.

Microsoft Azure Servers
If you need to host run a line of business app that’s not already cloud based, you can run up a server in the cloud and operate everything from there.

 

“The last person to go out of business after a disaster is the first person to start trading again.”

 

How does it actually help?

In the real world, the first service to be restored in disaster management is the mobile services. As an Optus Business Centre we saw firsthand just how much priority was placed on maintaining and repairing mobile services during the flooding in Townsville. Service trucks were waiting in ankle deep water for floodwaters to subside to complete a repair on one tower during the floods, and that tower was up and operational again while it was still raining.

If you can get into your business with a laptop and a mobile phone after a disaster, you can tether a personal hotspot from your mobile phone to the laptop and immediately be operational with zero data loss or extended downtime.

 

Data Security

We all know that data security and uptime is a major concern of users for cloud computing. Microsoft Azure meets or exceeds all of the security requirements for the US, European, and Australian Governments for cloud computing. There are four data centres in Australia, and two of them are required in Canberra to host Government cloud services.

With a data uptime of at least 99.99999999999% (yes, that’s literally and specifically eleven 9s) for the most basic package, you are likely to have better uptime and access to your data than you would for a locally stored server. One power outage and suddenly Cloud computing has given you better uptime!

Cryptoware is also a hot topic these days, with secure data redundancy online that is kept separate and safe from Cryptoware, you will always have the ability to restore your data back to a very recent state. There are also protocols in place that automatically shut down your hosted services if it detects Cryptoware activity. More information on all of this can be easily access by searching for Microsoft Trust Centre.

In short, there are fewer reasons than ever to persist with an on-premise solution. With data security, uptime, and affordable services available with extremely fast run up times, maybe it’s time you checked out what Microsoft Azure can offer your business?

Contact our team today to find out more.

deltaoffice.com.au