What happens when the cloud goes down?

As I write this post, Amazon’s EC2 cloud storage service is experiencing a severe outage that has affected high profile websites and services including Reddit, Hootsuite, and Foursquare. As more nonprofits bring mission-critical programs and services up to the cloud, it is important to plan ahead for events like this to make sure that your nonprofit can remain functioning during outages.

Things to Consider Before Uploading

Cloud computing definitely has the potential to provide greater efficiency while reducing hardware and maintenance cost for nonprofits. Here are some key things to consider before making the switch to ensure that things will go well for your organization:

• Do your research into your service provider’s reliability. Look into what guarantees your service provider offers as to uptime. Make sure to choose providers that include guarantees of high levels of availability in their service level agreement to make sure that you can rely on your investment. You should also review your service provider’s policies regarding downtime and if any compensation is provided for outages.
• Make sure that your nonprofit has enough bandwidth for your staff to reliably access cloud-based services. Not all service problems with cloud computing are the fault of your hosting providers. Some common cloud-based programs take a fair bit of bandwidth, and you will definitely need a reliable, high-bandwidth connection to work effectively, especially when many staff are accessing multiple cloud-based systems. Make sure that you take the cost of increased internet access into account when doing cost comparisons of cloud vs on-site solutions. Also, much like it’s important to research the reliability of your cloud service providers, make sure to choose internet service providers that also have high rates of reliability and good reliability guarantees in their service agreements.
• Be aware of the necessary security for the data you are bringing to the cloud. Certain kinds of data, in particular medical and legal information, have additional security needs and/or requirements. Make sure that any cloud service that you use provides the necessary level of security. You also need to keep up-to-date on any service agreement changes that your provider may give you - as hard as it can be to read those agreements, they will include changes to important policies that could otherwise go unnoticed.
• Understand the needs of your staff. Make sure to review the practices of your staff to ensure that the choices you make will work well. In particular, keep in mind how many staff will be using each of these programs/services. Review how many staff work regularly in the office and which work from home, as they will have different needs from your systems.

After You’re in the Clouds

After you’ve moved your services to the cloud and ensured that you have a good internet connection for accessing these programs, you should follow these steps to ensure that your staff will be able to continue working through outages:

• Setup offline access whenever possible. For cloud email services such as hosted Exchange and Gmail, this means having your staff members’ email and contacts sync to a workstation-based email tool such as Outlook. While you will not be able to send or receive new emails until your access is restored, you will be able to access your existing emails and contacts. Many online databases and other programs will have options for working offline as well, and you should follow their instructions to set up offline access.
• Run your own backups regularly. Cloud-based programs will typically run very good backups, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t run your own as well. In addition to giving you access to your data during outages, these backups will come in very handy in case someone accidentally deletes important files or if you want to move to another service provider.
• Document your support contact information. During an outage, it may become difficult to find the support contact information on your service provider’s website. Make sure to keep up-to-date contact information offline to ensure that you can find it in an emergency.
• Document your staff policies regarding outages. Much like how many nonprofits and businesses have policies regarding severe weather or disasters, you should create policies regarding internet outages. If staff will be prevented from working, will they still be expected to come in? How will closures and outages be communicated to staff if they can’t access their email? Document your policies and inform staff on what they should do before the outage occurs.
• Test it and try it before you need it. The best policies, backups, and recovery plans are only as good as their last successful test. Whatever policies and procedures you put in place for service outages, make sure that they are tested regularly to ensure that they work as intended in critical events.

As always, you can reach out to NPower’s consulting staff if you would like assistance in assessing whether the cloud is best for your nonprofit or if you would like help developing good technology policies and procedures.

- Elaina Buzzell