The 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union has been on people’s minds a lot lately, following the groundbreaking HBO series that examined the failures of leadership before and after the disaster struck. The one thing that the series makes crystal clear is that dealing with disaster requires bravery, integrity and a clear-eyed vision of what has happened and what needs to happen going forward.
When it comes to disaster recovery, preparation is everything. Without a solid plan in place, people will be forced to make it up as they go along.
Most of us will never have to deal with anything on the scale of Chernobyl, but that doesn’t mean that a work-related disaster – one with the potential to threaten your career and even the existence of your company – could not happen at any time. Chernobyl was a mega-disaster in part due to its reach: all of Europe was affected by its fallout. Similarly, in our globally connected economy, a breach or infection has the potential to spread all around the world instantly, so comparisons to Chernobyl are appropriate.
Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) is one of the most valuable and reassuring features of operating in a cloud environment. Every single organization must have a plan in place to deal with events that occur that are simply beyond any one person’s control.
Most experts would agree that the cloud is more robust than it’s ever been. Data and infrastructure that together form the lifeblood of the Digital Economy is backed up and distributed in ways that are far more secure than on-premise IT systems could ever have been. Nevertheless, minor mishaps can always happen that set off unforeseen problems. Some of these might even seem innocuous. For example, as described in the iland Disaster Recovery Handbook, “Squirrels chew through fiber cables, get electrocuted and start fires, taking down half of a Yahoo data center,” or “Snowfall collapses the roof of the data center supporting a national network of ATMs.”
It’s vital that companies prepare for things going wrong before things actually start to go wrong. Management must develop a disaster recovery solution for its business, one that covers every type of mishap conceivable and that gets things running as fast as possible with little or minimal damage.
Disaster recovery solutions should be paired with sophisticated security measures and stringent compliance. Taken together, this forms a triangular type of firewall that withstands time and infrastructure expansion.
“Regardless if it’s personal or business, expectations about data protection are at an all-time high,” says Gary Connolly, President and CEO of Host in Ireland. “Cloud service users need to have faith in the systems that touch the data every step of the way – from collection to distribution to storage. There is very little tolerance for companies knowingly or unknowingly mistreating data within the organization and loss of trust is not easily restored.”
iland Secure DRaaS allows IT workloads to be replicated from virtual or physical environments to our advanced security cloud infrastructure. Demand for new resources is always increasing, which makes data centers more complex and harder to manage. When selecting a cloud service provider, a company must choose one that goes far beyond simple backup to ensure all key workloads are protected, and that can zero in on a its unique business and compliance needs. From first click to failover, a company deserves a partner who is there every step of the way.
iland has been named a “Leader” by Gartner 4 years in a row in 2016, 201, 2018, and 2019 in their Disaster Recovery as a Service Magic Quadrant*. Sign up to schedule a free Disaster Recovery assessment right now.
By Steve Prentice
