Avoiding Data Center Disasters: Steps you can take so you don’t have to implement your disaster recovery plan
Disaster recovery plans for data are a necessary and fiscally prudent fact of life, but they are also costly and problematic. Most IT professionals privately acknowledge that despite rigorous testing, they have only marginal confidence that their plan will work in a timely way during a real emergency. How can this be?
In a real emergency, the IT function must be physically moved to a new geographic location. This means that applications must be put onto new hardware, risking configuration and compatibility problems. Relocated key people are torn between taking care of their families and taking care of the business.
Having watched the costly and problematic process of relocating data processing in an emergency for the last 30 years, senior executives should be aware of the following:
- Disaster recovery plan activations occur because something physical has happened–the data center’s facility infrastructure has been damaged. Water intrusion, smoke intrusion or electrical explosion are the usual culprits. Terrorism is a relatively new threat, but again, it is a physical threat.
- Although planned, a second, extended information outage occurs at the conclusion of the disaster recovery period when processing is returned to the original location
So, why not include physical disaster avoidance as an integral part of disaster recovery planning?
See Avoiding Data Center Disasters: Steps you can take so you don’t have to implement your disaster recovery plan, by Kenneth G. Brill.
Ken Brill is executive director of the Uptime Institute.
Tags: data center, disaster avoidance, I.T. DIsaster Recovery, Kenneth Brill, Uptime Institute
