Epic snowstorm highlights disaster recovery issues
Some firms may feel that the likelihood of lightning striking twice is remote, if not impossible. For business leaders who think that’s the case, take a look at the Eastern seaboard of the United States. Companies in Boston, New York City, New Haven and Washington, D.C. have been through a major hurricane and a crippling blizzard in the last six months, so for those that think rudimentary data protection is good enough, it might be time to think again.
Finding the right protection
When disaster strikes, company administrators need to know that they can count on having a reliable way of recovering their files, no matter what might happen to the rest of the business. Some corporations have taken their resources to the cloud, thinking that remote storage in a digital sense will save money and expedite recovery. On the other hand, considering the massive volume of information that would need to be transferred back to a businesses in order to restore databases from the ground up, it isn’t a cost-effective strategy. On top of that, as Bloomberg Business pointed out, a lot of companies are without power, so unless they paid extra for software-as-a-service or digital infrastructure hosting, they wouldn’t be able to access these files in a meaningful way, anyway.
Learning to take care of ourselves
Part of the problem here, the Minneapolis Post pointed out, is that more than half of American firms and private persons believe that the government will bail them out of any crisis. Again, reviewing the destruction of Hurricane Sandy, while there are assistance resources available, no company can wait almost half a year, have little to no service restored and still hope to remain in business. While this bolsters the cloud computing argument, businesses still need a way of supporting these assets.
Enter Data Center Knowledge, which stated that the average usage of remote hard disk management and tape tracking facilities has gone up exponentially since October of 2012, in the aftermath of Sandy. Those corporations that took the time to update their disaster recovery infrastructure may have been saved from another crippling blow when Winter Storm Nemo rolled through, and thanks to the increasing prevalence of virtualization and deduplication, these companies could experience even faster uptime if they implement these solutions in an effective manner.