It is important to make sure you have a comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) plan in place to avoid outages. Climate change has made severe weather even more relentless. These changes make it even more likely that disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, or even heatwaves can cause problems for your data center. The main goal of a disaster recovery plan is to ensure that data can be fully recovered as quickly as possible after an outage.
Here are some steps to ensure you have a comprehensive DR plan:
- Gauge what risks your data center could face. You need to be prepared for all types of disasters, no matter how unlikely they seem. While a data center located in a humid climate is less likely to be the victim of wildfire than a data center in California, it’s not entirely impossible. Make sure a plan is in place should something like this particular event ever occur.
- Create a straightforward, step-by-step plan to address the disaster. Distribute a physical copy of the plan to your employees. In the case of an outage, you may not be able to access any files housed on a computer or cell phone. Be sure this plan is transparent and includes information about personnel that should be contacted in the event of a disaster.
- Have a reliable backup site. You’ll need backup servers to minimize downtime in the case of an emergency, so make sure whoever you pick is reliable, redundant, and fast. Most importantly, pick a business that is nowhere near your current location, as that is the region where the natural disaster is occurring. If both you and your backup center is down, you may experience a catastrophic outage.
Outages and the failure to recover lost data is one of the leading causes of data centers being forced to shut down, so make sure to keep these points in mind when creating your DR plan.