News
Defeat power outages with data recovery in the Cloud
September 2011 by Marc Jacob
Doyenz says that, whilst the power outages that affected Arizona and California late last week will have brought many company’s IT resources to a shuddering halt, had some of those firms been foresighted enough to invest in a cloud computing-based business continuity and disaster recovery service, their operations could have continued from the cloud.
The key thing to remember about the cloud-based business continuity service is that, even if the main and backup power is out locally, providing the cloud service provider has mirrored resources, then business can continue from those locations where power – even battery power – is still available, says Eric Webster, Doyenz’ chief revenue officer.
“Perhaps more importantly, this means that a client of an organisation that was affected by last week’s USA outages could have continued operating their critical applications from the cloud like email or QuickBooks. This is an important value-add that a cloud-based disaster recovery service resource brings to the business table,” he said.
“While the actual cause of the power outages - which affected millions of people and tens of thousands of business - is still being investigated, many firms will now be picking up the pieces from the outages, which have undoubtedly cost many organisations a lot of money,” he added.
While normal business obviously cannot continue without power to the data centre and other IT resources, many staff choose to work from home when this sort of situation occurs, so this where a cloud-based IT service really comes into its own, since all of the data on the main company system – up to within a very short time before the power outage – will be held in the cloud, Webster explained.
When power returns, the organisation can then simply replicate the cloud data systems back to the main system and continue their business as before, he says.
Doyenz’ chief revenue officer went on to say that the firm’s cloud-based service has been developed using a comprehensive, multi-layered approach designed to deliver exceptional availability, performance, and security.
The service, he explained, is hosted in a Tier 3, SAS 70 Type II audited data centre – with worldwide locations – which have been designed from the ground up to maximise data security and information availability.
Webster notes that power outages affecting millions of people are not as uncommon as many people think.
In January, 2009, for example, a severe wind-storm knocked out power to 1.2 million customers in parts of France, whilst in November of that year, power to most of Brazil was knocked out due to a failure of transmission lines from Itaipu Dam, the world’s second largest hydroelectric dam, affecting more than 80 million people.
“That incident was the largest recorded blackout in the history of the world, but was by no means untypical, as in March 2010, around 15 million people in Chile – 90 per cent of the population – were without power for many hours when a major transformer failed in the south of the country,” he said.
“While the power blackouts in the US South West were major ones for the people and businesses concerned, the reality is that they were in the minor league as far as the world is concerned. Yet for each of the businesses affected, the effects were major and tangible. With cloud-based data recovery services, these effects could have significantly remediated,” he added.
