Disaster Recovery Comes in Focus After Super Storm Sandy

Super storm Sandy has highlighted the need for robust disaster recovery procedures. Luckily, there was sufficient notice of the severity of the approaching storm and most businesses were able to take adequate precautions to ensure safety of their data and ensure business continuity. But Sandy is being followed by another severe storm and therefore it is becoming clear that your disaster recovery procedures have to survive tests over several weeks. Quality of DR

One of the critical parameters your business continuity is linked to is the quality of your disaster recovery procedures. As businesses get more dependent on the Internet, data has become critical. A recent Gartner Group study brought out that 40% of businesses that lose their data in a disaster collapse within the next five years.

Although cloud computing is said to provide a very reliable solution to disaster recovery, there are many issues involved and merely by moving to the cloud does not make you safe. DR planning needs a DR look at the subject and not simply an IT perspective. You need to think like the military does - self sufficiency and being able to handle multiple threats becomes the key.

Cloud-Based DR and Testing

Cloud based DR  has a number of advantages - some are readily apparent, others are not. If you follow a virtualized approach to disaster recovery, your primary servers, their OS and applications, any software patches you may have used are all kept ready as an image that can be applied to create a new instance in any data center in any part of the world. Similarly, transactional data - data that changes regularly every day can be replicated - should be replicated - to data centers away from your primary ones. Then, if, following a Hurricane Sandy-like event, your primary data center were to go under water, you have everything available on a different location and you can be up and functional in a matter of minutes.

As compared to an on-site backup using tape or hard disks, a cloud-based DR site can handle more catastrophic events. You can also fine tune your cost and capabilities to give you the best possible return for your money. Many companies also use their DR site to take the load off their main site in times of excess demands. This also allows them to check the efficacy of their DR procedures.

Focus on Networks

With basic DR capability becoming reliable and affordable, the focus is now shifting to networks. This is one component of your IT infrastructure that cannot be outsourced or virtualized. Besides this, you need to be able to map your old IP addresses, firewall rules and VLAN configuration rules. As a result, many data center operators are now offering complete packages for DR.

DR Site Requirements

When you opt for DR packages, check the physical separation between your existing data centers and the DR center. It has been documented that some Greenfield data centers were built on land that are prone to flooding and hence cheap. While landscaping may take care of some aspects of flooding, there will always be vulnerabilities that exist which a better site will not suffer from. One major data center publishes data of about last several decades to prove that their site is intrinsically safe. Also ensure that they use different grids. If you are really concerned, there are accepted standards and audits of your disaster recovery sites. If these audits are performed regularly, there is certainty that when the push comes to shove, DR will work.

DR becoming easier?

Prior to Hurricane Sandy, many small and medium businesses found it hard to justify the additional expense of a DR site. However, seeing the damage that the hurricane has caused and the difficulty experienced in restoring power and communication to large areas so many days after the storm, it has become clear that expenses on DR are an insurance policy that will need to be taken out. Worsening weather, global warming, terrorism and hackers are making it essential to think seriously about DR.

Catastrophes like these are inevitable yet they cannot be used as an excuse for businesses suspending their operations. Every minute they are not operation is lost opportunity; this is why GMO Cloud makes sure that networks are on consistent uptime, facilities are well taken care of, and is ready for any unwanted disasters that threaten a businesses operations.

 

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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: Sanjay Srivastava has been active in computing infrastructure and has participated in major projects on cloud computing, networking, VoIP and in creation of applications running over distributed databases. Due to a military background, his focus has always been on stability and availability of infrastructure. Sanjay was the Director of Information Technology in a major enterprise and managed the transition from legacy software to fully networked operations using private cloud infrastructure. He now writes extensively on cloud computing and networking and is about to move to his farm in Central India where he plans to use cloud computing and modern technology to improve the lives of rural folk in India.