Implications When Choosing Cloud Technologies
Disaster Recovery Policies
A disaster recovery policy is a documented plan that sets out how an organisation will restore its systems, data, and operations following a major incident — a server crash, a cyberattack, or a power outage, for example.
With cloud, there are actually two policies to consider: the service provider's and the organisation's own. Providers often offer redundancy — storing copies of data across multiple servers so that if one fails, another takes over automatically. However, organisations should not assume this covers everything; they need to check exactly what the provider guarantees, often set out in a Service Level Agreement (SLA), and ensure their own internal policy fills any gaps.
Crucially, the two policies must complement each other; gaps between them are where disasters turn into prolonged crises.
Security of Data
Storing data in the cloud means it physically lives on servers that may be in another country. This raises real questions: Who can access it? What security measures does the provider use — encryption, access controls, monitoring? Organisations must check whether their data is being held somewhere with strong legal protections.
For example, data stored in the EU is covered by GDPR; data stored elsewhere may not have equivalent safeguards. Organisations should also ask whether data is shared across multiple customers on the same servers — a practice known as multi-tenancy — and what protections are in place to keep it separate.
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