The threats to data are many and varied, but perhaps none carries the same sense of threat as Mother Nature. Business owners have no control over the fluctuations of the weather, meaning that all their efforts to control their situations and circumstances have a gap in them. Of course, it won’t do for leaders to shrug and not prepare their organizations for natural disasters. The fact that they can’t stop these events just means IT departments have to build or purchase ironclad defenses to ensure their firms will still be there when the nasty conditions blow over. New developments in data protection could help them achieve this ideal.
Hurricane season begins
The East Coast of North America should be battening down the hatches right about now – it’s the late summer, a perfect time for damaging winds and rains. And, as reported by USA Today, for the first time in 2015, a storm has been upgraded to hurricane status. Hurricane Danny was declared a tropical storm two days before it reached hurricane levels. With winds of 75 mph, it’s clear that such a storm could cause trouble upon landfall.
Of course, Danny isn’t that large, as these storms go. USA Today noted that meteorologist put it in perspective – Hurricane Sandy, the famously disruptive storm that struck New York, was 321 times larger in terms of area. Danny’s name beginning with D means that it is the fourth storm of the year to be a tropical storm or larger. It’s anyone’s guess how many more will pop up over the course of the late summer and early fall, but organizations that have been hit by one will attest that one is too many.
The example of Hurricane Sandy is probably what leaders need to fixate on when they decide whether offsite backup solutions are right for them. The idea of companies in shambles trying to get their systems back together while the power is out and the streets are waterlogged is appropriately terrifying from a business perspective. Every storm swirling in the Atlantic – and the Pacific, for that matter – has the potential to do such damage to the cities and towns it touches. Therefore, disaster recovery systems that can get data clear are clearly valuable.
Advantages of the cloud
When clouds gather overhead, companies will be glad to have another kind of cloud on their side – cloud computing. Offsite backup solutions are critical when businesses’ offices are threatened by any kind of disaster, man-made or natural. The cloud adds a contemporary spin to taking information to a second location, making tape and hard drive transit seem very difficult by comparison.
A recent CIO piece by contributor Joanie Wexler explained more of the benefits that come along when organizations opt for cloud backup models. She suggested that these processes tend to work no matter what type of computing the deploying organization is using on-site. In addition, Wexler specified that smaller companies can finally back up their content due to the low comparative costs of putting recovery data in the cloud. Every firm should be defended against loss, and now they can be.
