Even with the biggest cloud storage vendors, outages can occur. Just like with traditional on-site storage, there are no guarantees you will be able to keep your data 100% safe. How can you prepare for such eventualities?

In late 2015, Amazon Web Service (AWS) suffered a huge outage, affecting the company’s systems as well as other websites that use the cloud service. As well as Amazon’s Instant Video and Books websites, Netflix, Tinder and IMDb were also affected by the outage. If you have applications and files that are critical to your business running or stored in the cloud, what procedures can you put in place to deal with a potential outage?

You should always keep on eye on the status of your cloud provider. Monitoring tools can track the performance of your cloud applications, checking that everything is functioning OK. They can also alert you to any currently-emerging problems so you can plan ahead.

Just like you would routinely backup data and resources that are stored on-site in the form of hard drives or tapes, you must get into the habit of backing up data that is stored in the cloud, to ensure swift data recovery in the event of an accident. If your business uses multiple cloud storage providers, you may be able back up data between the different service providers. You can also take out a ‘high availability’ service, which guarantees that applications will never go down for more than a few seconds. This service will protect you from outages and data loss.