BUSINESS CONTINUITY AND THE CLOUD

This paper seeks to examine the concepts of Business Continuity Management, Disaster Recovery and Cloud Computing. It explains the theory behind each of these concepts and attempts to show how they are or can be related. The paper shows that business continuity management and disaster recovery are related insofar as disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity management practice. The paper relates cloud computing to disaster recovery and business continuity management by examining the implication, benefits and risks of adopting cloud computing from a continuity standpoint. This is considered from two sub-perspectives: issues in continuity management for cloud computing services and issues in using the cloud for continuity management services and tools. We begin with an examination of the reasons that organisations should consider continuity issues. To clarify these we examined the importance of ICT to organisations