Niko – Snow, Backup, Disaster Recovery, and Continuity

What do snow, backup, disaster recovery, and continuity have to do with each other?

I work from Boston 4 days a week and we’re in the middle of a blizzard.  (Note: I commute to Boston.  I live 4 days a week at Unitrends’ Boston/Burlington offices and 3 days a week at Unitrends’ Columbia South Carolina offices.  So it’s fair to note that given my South Carolina roots that a single snowflake could cause a massive panic attack.  Nevertheless, I think Winter storm Niko is a fairly big deal even to folks who have lived their whole lives in the Northeast.)  It reminds me of all of the winter-related disasters I’ve seen since I joined Unitrends.

Snow, backup, and continuity are an interesting mix.  In terms of snow- and winter-related disasters, we tend to see problems ranging from frozen pipes in smaller businesses to structural damage due to snow and ice that shut down data centers.  There’s a common thread in all of these disasters; backup just isn’t enough. Freezing temperatures, ice, and snow impact not only data centers but transportation of IT professionals to and from those data centers.  Without continuity – automation and orchestration driven disaster recovery – all too often IT infrastructure is at risk which leads to the arch enemy of all IT professionals – downtime.

Why is this?  Because snow and backup alone don’t offer the ability to replicate off-site to geographics not impacted by winter storms such as Niko.  And trying to do local disaster recovery – for example archiving locally using tapes, disks, NAS, or SAN – don’t work without opex-intensive human beings to rotate tapes and disks and to move small NASs and SANs off-site.  Automation and orchestration implemented locally and at replication targets to perform disaster recovery don’t require human beings to protect data and enable business continuity.

So when facing winter storms such as Niko, with its snow and high winds, backup, disaster recovery, and continuity work as an all-in-one technology that helps business uptime and IT professional confidence.  It’s as simple as that.

As always, would love to hear your thoughts on snow, backup, disaster recovery, and continuity – or anything else.