“Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity, or neglect."
-- Anonymous
Years ago, I saw those words on a poster of a World War One aircraft stuck about 20 feet off the ground in the limbs of a tree. If we were to update this and adapt it to the business user’s desktop, it would lose its poetic charm but strike home with a whole new audience:
“Networked assets in themselves are not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than stuff on your hard drive, they are terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity, or neglect."
The warning is clear: Disaster may be only inches away, particularly for the unprepared. It’s a lot harder to recover after some accident knocks out a hundred or a thousand users than it is to re-boot your own machine.
In this blog, we will be looking at some actual disasters that have struck organizations when their networks have taken a hit from storms, fires, attacks, and far more mundane threats like human error and equipment failure.
For a business, there may be little correlation between the physical effects of a disaster and its financial impact. Imagine a business dependent upon a distant data center in the U.S. Tornado Belt. One good storm could leave their personnel and property untouched, yet destroy their ability to do business by wiping out their data, applications, and transactions. Elsewhere, an earthquake could cause deplorable loss of life and property damage, yet leave a business relatively unharmed if its networked computing capabilities remain intact. And an otherwise strong corporation could suffer irreparable damage by something as quiet as a software failure or equipment malfunction, which to the outside world does not qualify as a “disaster” at all.
I’ll be describing some instances where ZeroNines’ solutions for networks, virtualized environments, and clouds could have prevented disastrous downtime, and helped avoid unwanted headlines and losses to productivity, reputation, and revenue. Our approach does not use any kind of failover or cutover, since those occur after the downtime event and are not true disaster prevention. After all, it’s far better to avoid the downtime in the first place than to try to recover from it afterward.
Next week: How MyFailSafe really did provide fail-safe email during Hurricane Charley.
Contact ZeroNines to find out more about how our disaster-proof architecture protects businesses of any description from downtime.
Alan Gin – ZeroNines, Founder & CEO
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