Disaster Recovery on the Back Burner? Careful, It May Catch on Fire
Apr. 19, 2007

I’ve been reading up on disaster recovery lately, and what’s struck me is that events that can disrupt business—or even severely threaten their existence—can take an amazing variety of forms.

One company’s headquarters was struck by lightning. Then, as the motorcycle courier was returning with the backup tapes, he had an accident and the tapes were crushed under a truck’s wheels.  Another company fell victim to an unqualified plumber whose botched work caused water to pour from the ceiling onto the servers below.

And the mishaps go on. A London bank had backup tapes stored offsite, but when an explosion destroyed its data center it couldn’t find a machine to restore the tapes, which were compatible with only its last generation of servers. Another company suffered from chronic downtime and data corruption, which was eventually traced to an employee who sabotaged disk drives and circuit boards to increase his overtime pay. Within the last month, air conditioning problems caused both the state of Florida and the U.K. government to shut down their IT operations.

Despite public declarations that they intend to implement more robust disaster recovery, many enterprises are still limiting themselves to simply backing up data to tape. But doing this still leaves corporate data vulnerable, as its can take many days to fully restore a system.  The solution is straightforward-- virtually all companies should have a physically remote backup facility to protect data and ensure business continuity.

In the past few years, technical advances and price reductions in storage area networks have made linking storage servers in different cities economically feasible. By automatically backing up data in real time to a remote site, a business can get its operations back online almost immediately after a disaster.

Claiming you don’t have the in-house expertise to deploy a multi-site SAN is no excuse, since the marketplace is full of storage service providers that can deliver remote backup and storage for a reasonable monthly fee.

Perhaps it’s human nature to procrastinate.  After all, IT managers and staff face a range of urgent projects every day. Disaster usually seems like an abstract concept, right up until the moment it actually happens. And with disaster recovery solutions evolving so quickly, it’s easy to justify waiting for the “perfect” solution.

But, please, don’t wait too long.  Even the most agile and high-performance IT environment won’t save your business if its critical data is fried, drowned or crushed.

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08.28.07 - How to Cut Costs and Save the World
07.17.07 - Planting the Seeds for Datacenter Greenery
06.26.07 - Scale Out Zen — Do More with Less
06.14.07 - iSCSI...About to Go Mainstream?
05.30.07 - Is Your Data Center in a State of Quiet Desperation?
05.17.07 - EPA Data Center Guidelines: IT Power Use Is in the Spotlight
05.09.07 - Virtualized Data Needs Protection, Too
04.19.07 - Disaster Recovery on the Back Burner? Careful, It May Catch on Fire
04.10.07 - Professional Help for the Data Center
03.27.07 - Survey Shows Virtualization Taking Off
03.14.07 - Tackling Data Protection Alphabet Soup
03.07.07 - The Cost of Not Protecting Data
02.28.07 - Going Green to Conserve Energy in the Data Center
01.30.07 - Global Warming in the Data Center
12.02.06 - Open Standards Is for Systems Management Too
11.22.06 - Virtually Ready for Primetime
11.14.06 - Technology No Substitute for Communication
10.16.06 - Running a Data Center? What's Your Problem?