Securing Your Data Center From Natural Disasters

Natural disasters are no longer freak occurrences. The frequency of heavy storms, floods and severe cyclones is increased immensely in recent decades, placing not just personal life at risk, but also the safety of companies. They will face substantial loss of revenue if a datacenter fails, paralyzing the entire IT infrastructure. So you need to take action! Read on to find out how to protect your data center from natural disasters.

The statistic is terrifying: Every second company operating a data center in Germany, Great Britain and Turkey is insufficiently prepared for a natural disaster, although the incidence of cyclones, heavy storms, earthquakes and flooding in particular is increasing steadily.

Here’s what this means in the event of a flood – for example – and therefore the failure of a data center:

• Loss of the company’s essential data (e.g. patents, customer data)
• Failure of business-essential productive systems (e.g. servers, mail systems, ERP, CRM)
• Collapse of your website functionalities (e.g. the order feature for customers)
• Paralysis of the entire company
• Massive loss in revenue

The obvious, first off: Regular backups are absolutely imperative to ensure that the entire data is not lost in emergencies. But redundant data is worthless unless you have applications and systems to access it. This means that besides data backup, it is essential to have a backup, i.e. redundant IT, for productive systems in order to cope with disasters. Experts speak of Backup Recovery and Disaster Recovery here, which allows users to use restored data to activate the most important applications on the redundant system as quickly as possible.

Many companies use a backup DC solution on their own campus. But the value of on-site solutions like this is severely limited in the event of a natural disaster that destroys them along with the actual data center. So it is sensible to implement the emergency data center at a different location.

There are several ways of creating this kind of Off-Site Backup:

1. You build the emergency data center yourself at a second site.
2. You rent storage in an external data center from a specialized provider.
3. You launch an emergency data center in the cloud.

The first two options can easily get very expensive. Not only are Backup and Disaster Recovery Solutions in the Cloud the more affordable choice, they are also far more customizable.

Backup recovery and disaster recovery in one:

The cloud comes as a highly available off-site backup, as well as a disaster recovery solution. This means that your productive systems are secured and backups of your relevant data are enabled. So you can boot systems and data directly in the cloud in cases of emergency.

It doesn’t matter whether the complete failure of your IT infrastructure was caused by a flood, storm or other natural disaster, whether just individual components broke down on short notice, the cloud solution will always step in to prevent painfully expensive downtime.

Customizable:

You don’t have to make off-the-peg emergency plans. An emergency datacenter in the cloud lets you activate and disable resources to suit your budget and security requirements, thus creating an individually tailored performance. This scalability is a clear benefit compared to external solutions.

Cost-efficient due to metered services:

In the cloud, you only pay for what you actually use. Say the disaster doesn’t happen at all and the computing capacities are not needed, you will only be required to pay minimal costs for data backup. That means that a backup and disaster recovery solution in the cloud is more cost-efficient than a local emergency data center.