How can cloud computing help with power outages?

New analysis shows that office-related problems such as power and communications failures are now the top sources of business disruption in the UK, over and above technology problems.

In its analysis of invocation logs from 2010, SunGuard Availability Services found that technology-related disruption has actually fallen by 46 per cent since 2009.

With the biggest cause of disruption being power outage, it would seem that having a reliance on office locations for business IT infrastructure is inherently risky, unless of course you have the resources to pay for the power resilience provided by expensive generators or dual power feeds.

And disasters are not the only factor contributing to reduced business productivity. A survey of FTSE100 companies found that during the snow chaos which gripped the UK last winter, 73% of businesses suffered some degree of staff shortage and only 39% of those companies had the capability for employees to work remotely.

What’s more, giving employees the capacity to work from home can actually increase business productivity by 20 per cent, while at the same time cutting absenteeism and real estate costs (according to the results of a Citrix-sponsored survey from the Telework Research Network).

So, all in all, cloud computing software and infrastructure has many business benefits. Couple these benefits with utilising a cloud recovery solution such as CloudCover  – which replicates your in-house servers to the cloud, allowing users to access servers from anywhere – and you have complete business continuity.