Cloud Computing For Disaster Recovery

It’s been quite a year for natural disasters. Fires scorching thousands of acres at a time, rivers overflowing their banks, torrential rainfall, tornadoes everywhere. Are you feeling a little nervous that your business could be taken out at any time?

Sadly, an unfortunate twist of fate can hit anyone at any time. You probably already have some protections in place, such as property insurance, tape or disk file backups and maybe even offsite storage of important files. Ask yourself this, however. How will you get your business back running immediately after a catastrophic local disaster?

While having copies of critical documents and customer files may prevent you from going out of business permanently if disaster strikes, they aren’t enough to keep you running without a hiccup. For that you need backup infrastructure as well as files. A generation ago, that meant duplicate data centers that were located far apart. The idea is that the kind of disaster that wipes out your facilities is unlikely to hit two geographically separated areas simultaneously. If you are prone to earthquakes, one data center can be local but the other must be in an earthquake free zone. The same thing applies to hurricanes. If you are on the coast, your backup must be far inland.

Today’s disaster recovery solution of choice is the cloud. With infrastructure, platform and software as a service, you can do anything in the cloud that you would do in-house. The advantage is that the cloud is often far, far away.

Why choose a cloud solution over doing it all yourself? Avoidance of enormous capital investment is a very good reason. It’s not hard to spend millions creating the environmentally controlled and secure facilities with robust backup power and multiple diverse bandwidth connections, not to mention the racks and racks of equipment inside. This is one reason why many businesses decide that regular system backups are good enough. If the worst happens, they’ll simply get an insurance settlement and order replacement equipment. Oh? How long will that take? Just what is your income stream going to look line in the ensuing days, weeks or months?

One advantage of the cloud is that it scales fast. You could decide to have a minimal cloud solution implemented right now for the monthly fee it takes for storage and limited server capacity. If you get knocked out where are, you can log-into the cloud from wherever you can get a broadband connection and scale up in minutes or hours. When the crises is over, you can back off from all the virtual servers and go into a standby mode.

By the way, that cloud storage makes an excellent backup for your local files. Cloud storage is robust and almost infinitely scalable. This alone can be the justification for having a backup operation in the cloud.

What if you are in the cloud already? It’s not unknown for cloud systems to suffer outages just like anything else technical. In this case you may want to have a minimal backup system locally, in a colocation facility or set up as a private cloud in a different data center.

Hosted PBX phone systems can also keep you running after a disaster, almost like nothing ever happened. At least that’s the way your customers will perceive. it. You only need a network bandwidth connection and a few SIP phones to get your calls and voicemail. Being a network voice system, those SIP phones can be located just about anywhere... even somewhere else in the country.

Are you apprehensive that your business may not be protected from shutdown as much as you’d like? It may not be that expensive to have backup computing and telephone service in the cloud. Check options and prices now and rest easier that you have a recovery solution.

Document Digital Signature Made Fast and Easy

Are you frustrated because you have business documents you need to send for signature? It’s a pretty old school process, isn’t it? You have to print copies, mail them, wait for your client to sign and then send the completed documents back via return mail. It takes a long time, costs a bundle in postage, and generally brings business to a crawl. What if you could accomplish in minutes what might otherwise take days or weeks? What if you could try it for free?


This is the world of digital signature. You wouldn’t think of requiring someone to put on a powdered wig and use a quill pen dipped in an inkwell. So why are you stuck in the past century with mail and FAX? Especially since so many people don’t even have a FAX machine. If they every had one, they unplugged it at the same time they unplugged their typewriter. Today it’s all about desktop, laptop and notebook PCs, iPads, iPhones, Blackberries and the like. These people don’t want to go hunting for pen and paper. They want to mouse and swipe and be done with it in minutes. Now you can enable them to sign your documents electronically, quickly and easily.

The service you want is called RightSignature. It’s a sophisticated way to send documents for signature online. Here’s how it works. You choose a document from your favorite web application, select a Google Doc or upload a PDF or Word file. Then enter the name and email of each signer that you need on the document. Write a short subject and message and click to send. You can also add text fields, check boxes, initials boxes and other form fields that you need to recipients to complete. For many documents this will take you all of about a minute.

Your recipients are automatically notified via email that you’ve sent them a document for signature. They click on a link and are taken to the online document. They read it over and then sign. How? There are several methods that all work well. Most recipients just use their mouse to write their signature. You can also enable an option for signers to type their names to create a valid electronic signature. There’s a RightSignature iPhone App available free in the App Store so that iPhone users can sign by just using their finger on the touchscreen. Business users may sign on their BlackBerry. Even retro users who want a pen and paper solution can print out the signature page, sign it, and fax it back to RightSignature in order to execute the document.

Are these signatures valid? In this electronic age ESIGN and UETA laws have established the legal validity of electronic signatures in the US, and similar legislation has been passed in many other nations. Check out these laws to satisfy yourself that electronic signatures will work for your needs.

Your document has been signed by all parties and now it’s available for you to download as a PDF. Each signer and cc is automatically sent an email with that PDF document as an attachment. Each signed document also includes a Signature Certificate with contains signer information, an audit log and a unique identification number.

How much does this all cost? Probably less than what you are spending on copying and postage now, not to mention the waiting time you’ll avoid with digital document signatures. If you have a need to send out documents for signature and are curious if this solution will work for your business, take a 5 document free trial. No credit card is needed. Get started in just seconds. You may forget what a pen even looks like.