I was recently invited by the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) to speak at their conference in Cambridge. I happily obliged, not least because I can now legitimately tell people I have ‘lectured’ at Cambridge about business continuity strategy – my mother in-law will be so proud!

The lovely folk at BCI taught me four important lessons during my day there.

1. Cambridgeshire has a lot of disasters – planes crashing, petrol pumps leaking, tidal floods (along the river) were just the tip of the iceberg. Fortunately for Cambridgeshire you have a lot of very capable risk analysts. But this day further cemented my recognition that freak occurrences happen a lot more often than you’d expect and they can have catastrophic effects on business.

2. Most businesses aren’t terribly prepared for disaster – despite plentiful warning about taking disaster recovery seriously, the majority of businesses soldier on with their head in the sand. The ‘fingers crossed it doesn’t happen’ approach to disaster remains commonplace.

3. Many businesses are misinformed about the benefits of cloud – select the right cloud provider and your uptime, security, scalability and resiliency will be unparalleled. Sadly, many businesses only read the bad press cloud gets and assumes all cloud providers are the same.

4. Technology is taking over the world – robots are cool but do we really need an app to regulate the temperature of our shoes or to monitor the pace we eat our dinner? I am too old-fashioned for a computerised fork!

The BCI members have seen a lot of disasters in their time and lived to tell the tale. Therefore, I figured if my ‘lecture’ went badly this was the audience to cope! I felt things went pretty well and I taught the BCI crowd a thing or four.

1. Cloud is the obvious choice when considering disaster recovery – your data/applications anytime, anywhere on any device is the bread and butter of cloud and exactly what you need in a disaster.

2. Cloud makes business continuity a value proposition – gain remote access, increase collaboration, access new revenue streams, infinite scalability and peace of mind during a disaster. Disaster recovery need no longer feel like an insurance spend.

3. Most business disasters are not natural disasters – in our experience what is far more common than fires/traffic accidents/flu epidemics are hardware failure or outages, theft (especially cyber-crime) and human error (deleting files). Preparing for these inevitabilities is business critical.

4. Everyone loves a blue hedgehog! – Cloud Direct’s brand logo Eric the blue hedgehog never fails to get a reaction.

A lot of disasters have happened in Cambridgeshire but I have no evidence to suggest it is any safer anywhere else. If you are a business owner in Cambridgeshire, don’t panic. You don’t have to relocate to pastures safer. You can get extremely resilient cloud solutions from Cloud Direct that will allow you to access your business applications and data, even if a plane crashes into a petrol station in your proximity!