Standing Up to Mother Nature

If you’ve been following us for a while, you know that we like to emphasize the small, “every day” disasters that are so common yet so easy to overlook, like the fried power supply or the accidentally deleted file. The ones where you don’t need to declare a disaster and failover to a remote site, but instead need a local replica of your data and workloads you can spin up in a couple of minutes.

But Mother Nature earns all her headlines for good reason. The big, capital-D, Disasters also matter. And there’s a lot of them out there.

A recent story I read pointed back to a map that the New York Times published last year, “Where to Live to Avoid a Natural Disaster”. It is not encouraging. Between hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes, there aren’t a lot of businesses in the US that can take the chance of not having a DR solution to handle The Big One.

I did find a small corner of Wyoming that looks pretty safe, so if you’re a fan of winter on the Great Plains, I guess you could move your business there.

To reinforce the point, the Insurance Information Institute just published their data for 2011, and to the surprise of almost no one, it was a record-setting year for natural disasters.

This isn’t intended as fear mongering, but as a reality check. Back when disaster recovery was complex and costly, you could understand why a business might try to bravely ignore the risk from natural disasters. But the time for whistling past the graveyard is over. Modern, cloud-based recovery services have seriously altered the economics of DR. It’s time for businesses to stand up to Mother Nature.