Weather report: Stormy weather in the cloud?

Submitted by acohill on Tue, 07/03/2012 - 08:01

The storm last Friday night on the East Coast caused such widespread power outages that it took down some cloud-based services, including Netflix. Some of the outages lasted as long as twenty-four hours, but in general, the cloud hosting providers got things back online quickly.

Here is the real problem: suppose your business is located in one of the areas where power won't be restored for a week. Your office has no power....for at least five business days.

• Can you keep going?
• Can you access all your cloud-based services via laptops?
• Do you have a generator that you can use to power up your office?
• If you have a generator, does it provide pure sine wave output so that all your cheap battery UPS devices don't keep flipping on and off?
• Do your VoIP phones work?
• Do you have network connectivity?
• If your network provider is still up, how do you power up your local router?

Sitting in McDonald's and trying to run your business off laptops, along with sixty other business people, is not a plan.