When Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast almost one year ago, not only were many residential communities impacted; numerous small and mid-sized businesses and their infrastructure were affected as well. Even in today’s shift to the cloud, businesses still risk the effects of such an event and need to be as prepared as much as possible in advance. Redundancy, fail-over, and disaster-recovery are important, if you’re to avoid multi-day outages.
When designing your disaster recovery plan, prioritizing services is an absolute must. Ask yourself, “What would I NOT need in the event of another disaster like Sandy?” Put non-essential systems on the back burner so that your team can focus on mission-critical systems.
The best way to ensure access to critical data and services during a disaster is to duplicate them at an offsite data center. However, after 9/11, many companies in the Northeast moved their back-up data centers to sites closer to home because of limited access to air travel. Because Sandy took out companies’ primary data centers in New York and their back-up data centers in nearby New Jersey, the hurricane demonstrated the need to review the geographical positioning of back up data centers.
Finally, the cloud isn’t a panacea. Cloud-based applications and storage do mitigate some of the impact of disasters on companies. These applications and data are stored in the provider’s data center, and the applications may still be available to clients provided they have power, but be wary of your provider’s own disaster recovery plan and its potential impact on yours. Cloud–based backups need to be fully tested to ensure the backups can be used for a successful restoration within a reasonable amount of time. Companies should also be prepared to face issues with Cloud-based backups when restoring to different hardware.
To learn more about how Superior can help your business with its continuity plan and our in-house data center, contact us at (845) 735-3555 or visit www.superiortechnology.com.
Comments are closed.