Manufacturing Efficiencies: Reduce Downtime with Cloud Technology

Manufacturers are operating in an increasingly competitive global market. Any real or perceived inefficiencies in your manufacturing processes can impact production schedules and damage customer confidence, and you can be sure that competitors are ready and waiting to take customers away from you if the opportunity arises. On the flipside, however, manufacturing efficiencies can improve performance, speed up delivery and have a positive effect on your bottom line.

In a recent manufacturing blog we explained how cloud technology can hold the key to unlocking process efficiencies. Through the staged introduction of cloud technologies, manufacturers can reduce downtime, scale to meet changing demand, make evidenced process decisions and introduce manufacturing automation.

Let’s now have a look at each of these cloud technology benefits one at a time, starting with reducing downtime. In this blog post we will explain how cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solutions will help you gain manufacturing efficiencies.

Reduce Downtime with Cloud Technology

So how can you reduce downtime and increase productivity through cloud computing? One answer is through cloud-based backup and disaster recovery technology, which introduces the following benefits to manufacturing firms:

• Flexibility and scalability. A key advantage of cloud-based backup and disaster recovery technology is the ability to replicate what you need, when you need it, and retain it for however long you need. This allows manufacturers to be agile in the way they approach data management, placing emphasis on carrying out regular replications for constantly changing ERP systems.
• Rapid recovery. Cloud-based backup and disaster recovery offers low recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) SLAs. These low RPO and RTO values mean that manufacturers can reduce downtime – minimising the recovery window versus traditional legacy recovery methods.
• Geographic diversity. There are a surprising number of businesses that maintain their secondary data centres in close proximity to their production data centre – sometimes even in the same building. Cloud-based backup and disaster recovery provides geographic diversity, ensuring that a major incident at your production data centre doesn’t prevent recovery by also affecting your secondary data centre.
• Reduced resource overhead. The majority of cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solutions, including those offered by Six Degrees, include a management layer that covers business as usual operation. This service reduces the burden on your internal IT, freeing them up to focus on your IT strategy rather than day-to-day operational requirements.
• Enhanced security. Replicated data, in either secondary data centres or on physical backup tapes, can present a security risk if not handled appropriately. Six Degrees’ cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solutions encrypt data both in flight and at rest, ensuring its confidentiality, integrity and authenticity.