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Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology predicts a summer of severe heat this year and a bushfire season to rival the ‘Black Summer’ fires of 2019/20.
While our firefighters and emergency services are confident they’re “better prepared” than in the lead up to the last horror fire season, organisations need to evaluate their own preparedness – particularly their ability to recover operations should a fire impact IT operations.
As more of our lives become digitised, a business’ ability to operate and service its customers increasingly hinges on its access to data and applications.
When disaster strikes, physical hardware can always be replaced. But the data that it stored? Without a robust disaster recovery plan, that irreplaceable data could be gone forever.
Although a business might be able to recover its data, the speed with which it is able to do so can have an incredible impact on its operations. In fact, recent research found the average cost from a datacentre outage was roughly $9,000 per minute.
In the same way that rain clouds bring welcome relief during a bushfire, a different kind of cloud can help Australian organisations rapidly recover in the event of a disaster – cloud computing.
Bring the Edge In
While a disaster can impact a business anytime, from anywhere, industries which rely on far-flung networks of branch offices or store fronts – retail and banking being prime examples – have a unique challenge to manage when it comes to disaster recovery.
To properly serve customers, data needs to be available ‘at the edge’. But it is often the edges of an organisation’s environment that are most prone to catastrophe, whether that is bushfires, floods, or any other natural disaster.
Ensuring customer needs are met during the good times, while protecting critical data during disaster, boils down to what is known in the industry as ‘edge cloud’.
This entails data being accessible where it is needed, but it is ultimately stored, processed, and managed at the organisation’s central location – typically in a capital city.
Another benefit of this strategy is that all critical data can be managed with a handful of IT personnel based at the organisation’s headquarters, rather than requiring dedicated tech resources at every single site.
Hybrid Multicloud Helps Speed Disaster Recovery
Every organisation has a datacentre somewhere. It is the nerve centre of the business, ensuring all its employees have access to the data, applications, and workloads they need to service customers.
Should a bushfire threaten this critical piece of infrastructure, a second datacentre needs to come online quickly to ensure operations continue uninterrupted.
Crucially, the second ‘disaster recovery site’ needs to be in a geographically distant location. This ensures that whatever catastrophe is impacting the primary data centre does not also threaten the secondary site.
Consider Canberra’s Federal Government agencies. Most would be running from a primary datacentre within the ACT, but the secondary site would need to be located in another city such as Sydney or Melbourne as both cities are far enough away to ensure their safety, but also close enough that latency does not become an issue.
Counting on Cloud
In both these cases, cloud computing plays a pivotal role.
Cloud in this context is essentially renting space in another party’s datacentre. This makes sense in disaster recovery because it is more cost effective to rent space for recovery than it is to purchase the equipment, land, and power required to run it yourself – particularly when the hope is that it will never need to be used.
Modern disaster recovery, which today commonly follows the as-a-service model, is crucial to protecting business applications and data from natural (or human) disasters and service disruptions.
The as-a-service model enables the business to work with a trusted provider to ensure IT operations can be recovered as quickly as possible – in some cases, the entire process can be automated to failover instantly.
In the eye of the storm or heat of a bushfire, organisations shouldn’t have to worry about the loss of their data. When the lives of employees and staff are at risk, data centre ‘preparedness’ allows a business to focus on keeping its people safe.
In other words, count and care for your people – let the cloud take care of your data.
For more than a decade, Damien McDade has held executive leadership roles with multinational cloud, technology, and critical infrastructure firms including Aveva and Schneider Electric. His early career in electromechanical project engineering saw him specialise in heavy industries (including mining, wastewater, and numerous other process industries) which give him a unique insight into the infrastructure challenges today’s businesses face.
