It is always risk evaluation...
There are many ways of looking at this...
The cloud marketing hype of "low cost, security, stability, redundancy, backup" etc. is like any other IT vendors' marketing pitch. They all need to be assessed very analytically and based on this, presented to management on the cost/risk basis...
Yes it is feasible to provide failover backup to Office 365 - and sometimes it is optimal to have a hybrid approach - providing the efficiency of local resources with the redundancy of cloud solutions...
As always, knowing what is happening where is critical!
Ironically we found that out last week when our Office 365 email backup/redundancy service almost came to a grinding halt - because of the AWS outage. This affected the performance of the email function at the client even though the primary service was still fully functional!
At the end of the day, it is critical to inform management up front - and present them with scenarios. We had another client suffer from a hardware failure at 5:15 on a Thursday afternoon... with 5 x 8 next business day support from Dell. Yup - Dell arrived on the Monday to repair the server!
As always, management are very keen to save money - they MUST be made aware of the risks of doing so. And unfortunately many of them have this hype-driven perception that if everything is thrown into the cloud it will all work perfectly and everyone will be happy ever after....
Biting the hand that feeds IT
