Improve your Business Cloud Hosting by Mitigating Cloud Server Outages

Is your cloud hosting reliable? In most small and medium businesses, a cloud server fails more than other internal data facilities. However, this does not mean cloud hosting is unreliable, but like all forms of IT services, they must be selected and managed carefully to meet certain levels of reliability and availability. The selection steps can be technical, contractual or involve rethinking of the business application architectures, but without proper consideration, your business will get less from the cloud services.

How to mitigate cloud server outage risks

The process of protecting your business against cloud outages should start by assessing the reliability of your cloud provider data centers. It is important to understand that cloud providers with only one data center have a greater risk of failures. This is because they are prone to natural disasters. To protect your business against failure, you should request an availability guarantee or ask your provider for specific data center information.

The best way to protect your business against storage, network and cloud server outages is by negotiating a service-level agreement (SLA). The agreement should specify the availability guarantee and the time it will take to restore the service if an outage occurs. It is also beneficial to check the location of the cloud data center to determine if it is located in an area prone to natural disasters such as hurricane. You should also check whether the provider has a backup data center that can pick up load and backup power.

To ensure your business is safe from natural disasters, you should make sure the backup data center of your provider is in another region different from the location of the primary data center. This will ensure the backup center will not be impacted by the same natural disasters as the primary center. The backup center should have enough capacity to handle failovers of the primary center. If the capacity of the backup is lower, the provider should indicate how failover of the primary center is managed.

The other factor that creates cloud services outages is poor network performance. Network is not related to the cloud service provider, but it determines the success or failure of the cloud services. Most businesses experience cloud server outages because of poor internet connectivity. To protect your business against network related cloud hosting outages, you should move your business connectivity to more options that are reliable. You can move your business connection from the internet to virtual private network (VPN), secure multiple internet service providers (ISPs) or virtual local area network.