Reliability. Consistency. Agility. These are the words and ideas that cloud providers are using to sell their hosted services. But how much can we rely on the Cloud?

Late last month, severe thunderstorms in the Northeast shut down Amazon Web Services' data center for several hours in a highly publicized cloud services failure. For an industry that had been touting cloud hosting as the future of data storage and IT infrastructure, did this mean a horrible oversight or a glimpse of future problems? The answer is no. The cloud industry is still very young and this incident will help improve services as the industry matures. What it did highlight was the continued need for a comprehensive Disaster Recovery plan.

Last year was the worst year we've had in the history of disasters. Whether your infrastructure is cloud-based or closet-based, the intensifying weather conditions from violent storms to wildfires significantly increase the dangers facing IT operations. In a situation where a regional disaster can take out an entire IT system, the key is diversity. Making sure that your back-up data centers are in geographically-dispersed facilities can be crucial.

The bottom line is that the Cloud is a great PART of your disaster recovery plan, but as in any DR situation, you can't depend on the Cloud unless you have something else to fall back on.

What back-up measures do you have in place?

Innovation is brewing in the Advocate Communications Lifecycle Management (CLM) team in 2012! Though we stay busy managing over 1,350 monthly invoices for 24 global and domestic clients, we have spent the last few months refining our new Bill Pay service offering and are proud to announce that the service is up and running smoothly.  Traditionally, we have facilitated bill payment by processing invoices, auditing bills, and recommending payment but this new capability allows us to actually pay bills for our customers. Providing value to our clients by simplifying and streamlining the bill payment process, this offering will help customers avoid late fees and eliminate the administrative tasks associated with the invoice processing and payment for communications services.

For clients who choose this option, Advocate will establish a dedicated checking account for the sole purpose of bill payment. Each month, we request funding of the account on specific dates associated with invoice batch approvals. Once funded, Advocate makes the payments to the appropriate carriers thereby eliminating the middleman.

The addition of the Bill Pay option in our already-robust CLM offering helps us continue to go above and beyond in the value we provide to our customers. On average, customers recover 7%-15% each year through our CLM processes. Offering a premium service with a strong focus on ROI, we deliver custom reporting and tailored services to fit individual businesses' needs on an ongoing basis.