Cloud Disaster Prevention and Recovery for Businesses in Japan
“Please help, save me! Do something!” These are simple messages that people convey when they experience a natural disaster like the 2011 Japanese Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami.
A natural or man-made disaster of intense magnitude can disrupt power supply, destroy hardware infrastructure, or limit connectivity, causing entire business establishments to tumble down. In a technologically-advanced nation like Japan, the impacts of outages in data centers can be catastrophic. The earthquake scenario underscored the growing need for effective cloud disaster prevention and backup strategies and most Japanese enterprises. When tragedy struck, it delivered a key blow to business processes, rendering millions unable to carry out their activities.
Loss Prevention:
Disasters are inevitable, but the question is: Are you prepared? According to a study by Gartner, 80 percent of all companies that experience a major disaster will go out of business if they cannot gain access to their data within 24 hours. As far as cloud computing is concerned, there are several key aspects to note while initial infrastructure for such business models is planned and implemented. As with any issue, prevention is better than cure, and the latest methods to prevent data loss or information damage are the safest way to combat outages in cloud services.
During the great north eastern earthquake and tsunami, one of the key problems to befall Japanese businesses was their data centers and cloud infrastructure being set up in seismically-sensitive and disaster-prone geographical locations. That soon changed!
Identify the disaster recovery plan:
Having an effective disaster recovery procedure is key. For countries like Japan, it is wise for businesses to have an effective disaster recovery procedure prepared and documented as soon as they shift to cloud.
Decisions should be made as to who will head the recovery team and how many members should they manager. What kind of software and hardware tools are required? Also important is to estimate time and cost required for every individual recovery module, as well as total recovery time. Criticality and priority of tasks should be documented so that higher priority tasks with high criticality can resume their services first. These procedures may seem easy to read, but require months of effort and teamwork.
Periodic drills carried out for disaster recovery procedures will aid the recovery team in preparing for catastrophe without having to wait for instructions. Working on live scenarios of recovery would provide valuable expertise to recovery staff.
Recovery of cloud-based business models is a critical task in modern business enterprise. No data should be lost or damaged and the procedures should be completed as fast as possible, because every second of service disruption can prove to be fatal for the businesses’ future. As such, technical staff with proper expertise should be deployed and enterprises should not take chances with any aspect of recovery. In the event that there is scarcity of staff to monitor and conduct the DR plan, businesses should consider getting a cloud provider that can do all these work so they no longer need to be highly burdened with these problems. GMO Cloud shares in its Network and Data Center section (in addition to their Security measures), the features of their network and data centers that will prevent disasters from happening.
Be Part of Our Cloud Conversation
Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.
About the Guest Author:
Mandira Srivastava is a fulltime freelance writer who specializes in technology, health and fitness, politics, and financial writing. Equipped with degree of mass communication and having worked for both private and corporate clients, I have experience meeting a wide range of writing requirements and styles.
