Interesting on the recent findings regarding an IT audit of New York States”s Pension Fund points out something that is often glossed over in the due diligence of cloud based solutions: the ability of the cloud provider to provide geographic failover for disaster recovery.
Geographic failover, ideally providing real time to near real time failover for mission critical systems in the event of a disaster in a separate geographic zone with independent power and environmental grids far enough away from the production site, is no longer a “luxury” feature when evaluating cloud solutions. In fact, it is a basic business requirement.
The article also demonstrates the principle that bigger is not necessarily better with regards to solutions deployment as one would have thought a large organization such as a state pension fund would have had better systems than the average money management firm. The good news is that organizational size is no longer the predominant factor with regards to systems deployment. Firms large and small can take advantage of state of the art technology and IT systems to address concerns over business continuity planning and DR. It just takes the right cloud technology partner.
