Everyday Disasters

This post was written by Mike Hamilton, nScaled Solution Architect…

When hearing the words “Disaster Recovery” it is really easy to conjure images in our minds of utter catastrophes. Natural disasters come to mind – tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods. When it comes to protecting data and maintaining operations, it is easy to see how things like natural disasters could impact a company’s ability to protect data and maintain operations.

As human beings we face the risk of things like natural disasters and how they would impact our lives, and yet overall the frequency and likelihood of such disasters is fairly low. Even when disasters like this happen, the overall impact can vary widely.

This idea got me thinking about little disasters that happen every day. Little disasters are things that make us late for work or miss going to the gym. It’s the everyday disasters like a car not starting, stained clothes, upset toddlers, traffic jams, etc., that, while small in nature, can have relatively large impacts on how our days play out. The everyday disasters have an impact on the continuity of our day.

So what is the equivalent in the IT world?

As I said before, it is easy to focus on major catastrophes and think about data integrity and business continuity in that context. The probability of the catastrophic disasters is the same personally or professionally. But the question is whether or not there are smaller everyday disasters that disrupt business continuity in the same way as cutting yourself shaving in the morning could make you late for work.

And of course the answer is “yes”.

Viruses, user error, targeted attacks, administrative error, patches, version upgrades, resized LUNs, and a myriad of other “little” issues can have a very real impact on business continuity. I say this because I’m in the business of disaster recovery and yet day to day, the issues we end up helping our customers with are generally recovering from these everyday disasters as opposed to massive failures. Whether the cause is large or small, it is always good to have a plan.

Part of the beauty of disaster recovery as a service, like what we offer at nScaled, is that planning for the large disasters makes recovering from the everyday disasters easy. Planning for big failures should make recovering from little failures that much easier – and in fact it does. Another huge benefit of disaster recovery as a service is that during a crisis, whether big or small, it always helps to have a clear head in the picture.