Disaster recovery a growing concern as both equipment failure and riots highlight vulnerabilities

The recent power outage in Dublin, Ireland is being blamed on transformer failure and affected the famous CityWest business campus as well as a number of data centres in the area including data centres operated by Microsoft and Amazon, which also serve the mainland.  Additionally with lawlessness affecting the streets of Britain, and numbers of businesses suffering riot induced downtime, the spotlight is once again being focused on Disaster Recovery (DR), Business Continuity (BC) and remote working - all possible via cloud computing.

A report earlier this year from Symantec found that 57% of SMBs (up to 99 workers) have no disaster recovery plan and 47% of mid-sized companies (100-1,000 employees) do not have a recovery process in place.

Andrew Gilbert, managing director at data centre and communications solutions company, Node4 said, “In these troubled times a DR and BC strategy is fast becoming a necessity rather than a luxury and it is surprising the number of businesses which have not considered this as a pre-requisite for their business plans.  With the economy at a critical stage of the recovery, businesses cannot afford to be out of action for even a few days, and in these technology-led times that means access to fully functional IT must be maintained, irrespective of local situations.”

The Irish outage highlights the fact that although most data centres have back-up power supplies and security, any data centre in isolation may be vulnerable.  Furthermore with large sections of major cities becoming ‘no-go’ areas, access to your place of work should not be taken for granted.  Gilbert recognised this many years ago and embarked on a strategy of ‘data centres on your doorstep’, putting together a network of data centres across the country which can be inter-linked to offer one of the most robust networks in the UK.

Gilbert continued, “Node4 has taken this approach and because of demand, our network will be growing from four to six data centres very shortly.  I believe the best strategy is to adopt ‘private shared or private dedicated cloud’ which can be configured to organisations’ specific needs, keeping your data off the public network while being part of a resilient interconnected data centre network.”