Cloud computing has many advantages- it’s easy to maintain, very flexible and scalable, and brings significant cost savings to businesses hosting their data in this type of environment. The cloud, however, is not fail-safe. We saw that over the weekend, when Amazon’s Northern Virginia data center suffered a power outage resulting in service interruption for companies hosted in the data center. Netflix, Pinterest, and Instagram were among those companies whose data was unavailable until the “power event,” as Amazon called it, passed, and the network could be restored.
Live, available, and flexible data and services are one of the driving benefits of a cloud-based computing infrastructure. Any time this infrastructure fails and a data center is taken off-line, the results are both frustrating and expensive. Sometimes the interruption comes by means of human error, and sometimes it’s caused by a natural disaster, as we saw with the Amazon power outage debacle. With all the different ways and areas a failure can occur, it’s difficult to be sure that your data will be accessible when you need it.
Fortunately, technology exists to ensure business continuity. To have a truly high availability (HA) infrastructure, your solution should include replicated and backed-up data to both on and off-site locations. This will keep your systems and data continuously accessible, as well as provide you with disaster recovery tools so you can avoid network downtime and loss of service. For more information on disaster recovery and business continuity, click here
