Lessons IT Departments Can Learn from Natural Disasters

In the last eighteen months, a restless Mother Nature wreaked havoc on the Carolinas, Florida, Puerto Rico and Mexico. Businesses need to take steps to be prepared for the worst and protect their computing resources. Enterprises across the country have discovered they are much better off trusting their disaster recovery needs to those specializing in keeping their data safe, sound and accessible.

The world’s leading financial and technology firms spend lots of money trying to ensure that their data centers hum along regardless of what they encounter. When Hurricane Sandy struck New York City many of the world’s largest and most successful financial and technology giants’ data centers were literally washed away. Some were buried under several feet of water and others stayed dry but could not rely on a compromised power grid to keep their systems online.

The Eye of the Storm

Many companies like the sense of comfort and security keeping information on site and in their control brings. Such thinking has become flawed. Should headquarters or their datacenter is knocked offline, data stops flowing and the business suffers dramatically.

During and often after a natural disaster, most local and corporate data centers face several challenges just to stay online including but not limited to power and voice/data connectivity. Transmission lines and entire power grids are often the first casualties when a storm hits. Organizations may have backup generators, but they are usually designed for short term outages, a few hours or perhaps a day or two. Keeping them fueled when travel is treacherous and roads are closed becomes less and less likely as the impact from a natural disaster lengthens. 

Another problem is data center infrastructure has become larger, more dispersed, and more complex. Viable backup plans take time and effort to design. Rather than spend time in areas where they have little to no expertise, enterprises are better off handing the work to those who specialize in understanding and protecting against disasters, natural and otherwise.

Turning to a Professional

Professional Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) companies, like Virtacore, are ready to serve corporate data protection needs before, during and after an event. We do so by protecting your data in secure and geographically disparate data centers that offer unparalleled physical and environmental security while offering 99.99% uptime.

Physical security involves the protection of the data center and equipment from unauthorized hands-on access. An array of security equipment, techniques, and procedures to control, monitor, and record access to the facility are used. These include, but are not limited to:

·      Monitored and recorded using CCTV

·      Multiple two-factor electronic and biometric authentication

·      Staffed 24x7x365 by security officers with man trap

·      Visitors & equipment are screened upon entry

Environmental security concentrates on implementing controls that protect against environmental threats, such as fire and heat, water, power loss, and natural disasters, and manmade problems, such as operator error. DRaaS data centers are designed to mitigate and eliminate disruption and feature sophisticated functions in areas like:

Power: A select group of world class data centers have learned lessons from weather events around the globe. Now equipped with primary and backup systems that feature uninterruptible power supplies along with multiple redundant onsite generators, they can virtually guarantee power and connectivity for as long as needed to restore the local grid.

Cooling: Multiple redundant and regularly tested HVAC systems provide leading edge designs that improve airflow, temperature and humidity to keep the infrastructure healthy.

Flood Control: The data centers are built well above sea level and include state of the art flood monitoring and control systems.

Fire Detection and Suppression: Multi-zoned, automated fire detection and suppression systems are installed so problems do not spread from one zone to another.

Sophisticated Network Rerouting: Network operations centers track outages in real time and immediately reroute traffic to other locations if a problem arises at a data center.

So What Now?

With the chance of a natural disaster impacting a businesses localized or individual data center growing daily, the time is now to take advantage of protection and business continuity delivered by an established World Class DRaaS provider.