Applications in the cloud provide business benefits but at an undefined risk to your business.
Cloud based services and ‘SaaS services (Software As A Service) are becoming all the rage the concept has been around for at least twenty years now.
Leading telecoms service providers have been offering outsourced services such as site telephony ‘centrex’ virtual PBX services for many years. With the revolution we experienced with the Internet we only gained more opportunity to connect services with businesses from a remote location.
One thing that has changed in that time is the availability of bandwidth. This has enabled applications to work at a business speed whereas before the line speeds limited enterprise grade applications from running fast unless significant data networks were in place.
Will your cloud computing solution turn into the perfect storm?
Yet one thing that hasn’t changed in that time is both the network’s ability to fail and for data centres to go offline for various reasons. So whilst cloud based services and software services delivered from data centres offers some compelling benefits, business continuity plans need to plan for these unforeseen events.
This technical dilema wont go away soon. So the less reliant your business is on your network’s up-time to run your business the better and cheaper your disaster recovery and business continuity plans need to be. Whilst EPOS systems as a networked application are critical for the operation of your business, the solutions tend to be bullet proof because everyone knows how key they are. But as more and more opportunities for new applications come online to benefit the operation of businesses, the more businesses need to push networked applications through the same network and the more risk businesses take.
This is one of the reasons why Melody Pods takes the distribution benefit of a network but doesn’t rely on the network to always be available to play music constantly over long commercial opening hours of modern day businesses.
The silence within a store that has lost it’s background music can be disconcerting and go to confirm to customers a business is not ‘open for business’. So keeping clients longer, just long enough to get the network up again and the business trading is critical. Anything, such as the music, has got to be a god-send in these situations.
Whilst networks may be down, we can still play music to your customers leaving you to focus on get those EPOS and other business critical applications operational again as soon as possible.
So don’t worry about us, we will keep on playing and leave you alone to get on with your recovery plans.
