You will have undoubtedly read a lot about hurricane Sandy over the last few weeks and seen the devastating pictures in the news. While the cost of hurricane Sandy will run into millions of dollars some valuable lessons have been learned, especially in the context of IT and data security.
Companies these days rely on data. Entire businesses are run based on data with systems such as CRM systems and ERP systems at the forefront of modern businesses. Without these businesses can’t make informed decisions and quite literally spend millions of dollars each year acquiring high quality data. While this is common practice companies often have different approaches to data storage security.
Many companies like to house their servers internally, largely because they feel it gives them more control and have backup servers remotely. While this can make sense there are weaknesses with this approach. For example some companies in New York had both their live servers and backup servers located in close geographical proximity to one another. Companies with this approach lost year’s worth of data and may have drastically reduced their competitiveness in their given market place.
Others house their data offsite and have their servers managed privately. This again is a good approach but again some hosting/server management companies were hit by the storm and caused significant disruptions for businesses. Most reputable hosting/server management companies have effective backup solutions, which means they can recover their clients data quite easily. However this takes time and time is money to most businesses. So what can businesses do?
Well, they could look to cloud solutions and housing their servers in other countries. Cloud computing technology has come a long way and offers some significant advantages. The main one being data accessibility. Businesses affected by hurricane Sandy would be able to access their data in seconds and in turn cause limited disruption to their businesses. Accessibility/portability is everything these days and the cloud is designed with this in mind.
Data security is also important and some geographical locations are more susceptible to natural disasters than others. Businesses should therefore look to stable locations and countries to house their data. For example countries like Switzerland, which experience very few problems and have a strong and dependable political climate. Businesses could hold their servers here and then access their information via the cloud.
There are of course many options available to businesses but more and more of them are moving to cloud solutions. This is often for the reasons highlighted above. Hurricane Sandy has undoubtedly been an expensive lesson for many and few could emphasize more clearly the importance of disaster planning.
