As an IT professional, you pride yourself on uptime and protecting your company’s critical data. If you are lucky, you will never experience interruption due to a natural disaster. However, should the day come when you are in charge of disaster proofing, here are a few tips to help protect your critical business data.
- Onsite generators: Ensure they are fueled and operational. You would be surprised how many times our Curvature network engineers have visited data centers where generators were inoperable. Test yours now.
- UPS and battery backups: Make sure that all UPSes in use have functional batteries. The middle of a hurricane is not the time to find out that the whole datacenter UPS is down to half capacity because a battery module is offline.
- Check your backups: Make sure backups are done correctly. Once validated, move the data to an offsite facility. Preferably outside of the perimeters of the impending disaster, if possible.
- Migrate data: If there are multiple data centers that are geographically separate, start proactively migrating data and workloads to safer areas. For example, if you use VMware, use tools like vMotion to simplify this process.
- Simulate a failover: Verify that failover and other high-availability features of all your IT systems are working as designed. Best suggestion is to simulate a failover late one evening or during a low-traffic period.
- Ensure there is a disaster response plan: In the event of a disaster, a substantial amount of work will need to be done quickly to ensure business continuity. A documented response plan ensures that everyone will know their roles and responsibilities in the management and recovery process.
- Have a robust monitoring and response solution: Use Curvature’s Network Monitoring and Asset Management System, part of our Managed and Professional Services offerings. Upon detection of an issue, Curvature delivers responsive recognition and resolution of network resource failures, providing both proactive and reactive support. Incident response services include: isolation and diagnosis of problems, problem tracking and status, recurring problem analysis, recovery protocols, and repair coordination.
Natural disasters can wreak havoc on a data center or office, leading to power events, leaks, or – worst of all – data loss. To assist you during times like this, Curvature’s engineering team is expertly trained in securing customers’ IT infrastructure to ensure the business runs smoothly during and after natural disasters of any sort – hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or blizzards.
To read more on Curvature’s networking and data center solutions, please visit:
http://www.curvature.com/networking-and-data-center-solutions
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