Thoughts after a 6.1 Shaker + The 7 Rules of BCDR

The dust has almost settled after the recent “shaker” – or an earthquake in our Californian slang – gladly, this time without casualties, serious injuries, with only minor property damage. Considering the area – Napa Valley, the Wine Country, delicate wine bottles don’t tolerate earthquakes well, but the damage was mostly “sentimental”. Still, it is always a wake-up call (literally at 3:30 am), both unexpected in a sense that you never know when and where it will strike next, and totally expected here in California. Apparently there is a forecasting service already in beta, predicting it up to 10 seconds in advance.

For us at nScaled, this was business as usual. Checking the status of potentially-affected customers. Answering phones and emails. Gladly our data centers hosting our customers’ environments are far away, in remote FEMA zones. All customers are safe – both the staff and the IT. So it’s good. Like firefighters – no fires, back to sleep (the real firefighters, though, had some real fires to put out that night).

It wasn’t this easy in the East Coast when Hurricane Irene hit back in 2011. A Category 1 storm, when it made landfall it caused an estimated $1 billion in damages in New York alone. Roughly 7.4 million homes and businesses in the US lost electrical power as a result of Irene. That was when the right technology, dependable staff, and the decisions made long time ago, made all the difference. With a lot more damage to deal with, all of nScaled’s affected customers safely continued their operations out of our cloud data centers, often not even noticing any change in quality of service. Eventually all failed back.

The Seven Rules of BCDR

So, we felt we had something to share – the knowledge and the lessons we’ve learned over the years, protecting and recovering our customers’ data and applications. We condensed all of this wisdom (or, at least some of it) into 7 key rules, sort of illustrating the best practices of business continuity and disaster recovery for IT. Read our new white paper to learn more. And stay safe, whether it be hurricanes, or earthquakes, simple power surge or spilled coffee.

This is, of course, pretty high level – but it will help you to understand your options, avoid making major mistakes, and ultimately will help you with selecting the right BCDR solution that will work for you. Especially because this is one solution that has to work, even when everything else doesn’t…

Read it here: http://nscaled.com/7-rules-business-continuity/?form=75. Pass it on!