Outages in the cloud – how to minimise risk and recover fast

ISPs and hosted service providers can be as vulnerable as any other organisation to cyber attacks and the impacts of network and power outages. Building resilience and rapid recovery into cloud environments demands a collaborative effort by customers and service providers, says InfoTech CEO Mauritz du Toit.

Du Toit notes: "A number of ISPs and cloud services have suffered outages recently, with severe and costly impacts for their customers. The FIDO Alliance open industry association has warned that cloud service providers are now prime targets for cyber attacks and we expect to see extended load-shedding increasing the risk of outages too."

With the risk of outages increasing, organisations need to be more selective about the cloud service providers they work with and more proactive about ensuring their own resilience.

InfoTech's approach to mitigating risk and reducing downtime is to offer integrated private cloud hosting, data recovery, advanced backup, managed services and cyber security and forensic services to help customers improve their security posture and recover quickly from outages.

Du Toit notes that while cloud service providers can provide robust infrastructure and expert support, customers have a key role to play in protecting their data and recovering quickly after an outage.

"Many organisations select a cloud platform or service based on price alone, but these cost savings come at a price if they result in the business being offline for days," he says. "Organisations need to choose the right platform for their needs and invest in services that assure resiliency and specific recovery time objectives."

Infotech Private Cloud Solutions are designed to ensure a high level of infrastructure resiliency, self-healing to eliminate fire drills and built-in capabilities including snapshots, clones and replication to meet specific needs. "Resilience is not just about failover and DR: you must ensure that the applications also run optimally in a DR environment. This requires testing and planning. Infotech mitigates this by running regular, stringent DR, replication and restore tests on both our own and customer systems, and we offer product agnostic neutral DR workload hosting supporting Azure, Hyper-V, AWS and VMware Nutanix."

InfoTech has also added extra layers of security, offering native data encryption, app-centric micro segmentation and real-time security auditing.

However, Du Toit adds: "Data protection is always the responsibility of the customer – the service provider can only guide and propose solutions to protect the data." Best practice measures to secure data is attending to basic cyber security hygiene, restricting access to key data and keeping multiple immutable copies of data.

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