Why Disaster Recovery is not an Option

Disasters happen, we’re in the middle of one right now with the pandemic and we’ve also recently blogged about the major OVH datacentre fire that shook the IT world. We’re very thankful that no one lost their life or was seriously injured but recognise that significant long term damage was done and many businesses have been left struggling to recover.

So disaster recovery is just not an option at Anywhere Technologies. Right from the start we have required a disaster recovery plan and resulting actions to be built into our systems as a default. There is no point asking, do you want it adding to your package? This shouldn’t be a choice. It has to be there.

Disaster Recovery in Cloud Computing

This may sound a little glib but when we were creating our datacentres, we reviewed the offerings of the major players on the market and decided to do things differently including recognising our own responsibilities to our clients.

When OVH’s fire crashed 3.6 million websites and caused significant data loss, customers were soon being asked to invoke their own “disaster recovery measures”. We are pretty sure that many of them thought that was built in and were shocked to discover that their data was irretrievably lost. Many backup devices were destroyed alongside those they were backing up.

We feel this is sidestepping a fundamental element of any reliable cloud hosted backup amd recovery system and is one of the reasons we have disaster recovery as a core feature of our datacentre network design.

Our Responsibility for Ensuring Robust Disaster Recovery Measures

We are the experts, so we will guide you through the fundamental elements of what is needed and make sure that the key parts are there and cannot be “opted out”.

Allowing customers to pick and mix from a range of options may provide many with the end result they are looking for, but in many cases it is likely to lead to errors of omission at the very least.

Our job is to protect your data, not to provide you with a selection of tools that will protect your data if you configure them correctly. There’s a difference. We sit with you, we work alongside you and we won’t shy away from telling you if you’re making a poor choice or leaving your business vulnerable.

Disaster will happen so start from there

We have to assume that a disaster is going to happen and to provide a disaster recovery plan and recovery package that is robust enough to deal with a total loss of parts of the system and still be able to cope.

That is a key area and how we add value to your business. And of course we hope you never have to use it.

What can you do next?

A first step would be to evaluate the risks. Consider the unthinkable, not just something like an extended power supply failure, but how about an entire country failing? Where is your datacentre actually located? Is it possible you could lose access to an entire location?

Recent events have shown you can, so don’t rule out anything. Many people will have considered their office being closed for a year as a fantasy scenario, so limiting your ideas to the reasonable will drastically weaken any system and data recovery plans you have.

Guidance from Anywhere

We do not expect you to do this on your own. We will work alongside you to develop a full disaster recovery system and offer our expertise to help you think the unthinkable.

So please give us a call and one of our expert team will be in touch to arrange an initial discussion. We are ready to help.