The summer of 2023 was marked by one extreme climate crisis after another: sweltering heat waves, catastrophic flash floods, wildfires blowing smoke all across the country, and some of the worst air quality in recent history. Furthermore, unpredictable weather patterns have been extending into the colder months, causing states like Texas to endure severe freezes, power outages, and shortages of heat and water for their residents.
Extreme weather conditions are causing more outages and blackouts in our electricity systems than ever before. These disruptions are forcing IT leaders to come up with new plans to protect their data and IT infrastructures while safeguarding workloads amid these crises. A business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy is crucial to staying online in the midst of a disaster.
Thus, the question: How do companies outsmart climate change and protect themselves?
Local Redundant Power Supplies
To keep your environment running and IT infrastructure online, some organizations turn to redundant power supplies via backup generators or even batteries. Critical infrastructures like hospitals, airports, and various data centers have these types of backups in case of an emergency, like a blackout.
Most companies haven’t had a burning need for that … yet. But natural disasters are becoming more and more frequent due to climate change, and for places like Arizona that saw record breaking heat, businesses are starting to feel and become victim to the heat.
Between 2000 and 2021, 83% of all power outages resulted from weather-related events. These outages are a direct threat to physical data centers and IT infrastructure.
So how do you secure your IT infrastructure if there’s a blackout in your area?
The Answer: Geo-Redundancy
To fortify your system and keep your environment running without interruptions, companies must turn to geographical redundancy. Geo-redundancy is the relocation of data servers and other infrastructure across different geographical locations. It’s the highest level of resilience within a BCDR strategy.
By having a secondary geographic location, companies reduce the risk of a total blackout by having a secondary backup center that is unaffected by any outages. With this backup solution, traffic is rerouted to the secondary site with minimal to no downtime for users in a duplicate, backup, or cloud environment.
Replication to Improve Reliability and Fault Tolerance
Once settling on a geo-redundancy strategy, the next step is choosing where and how to replicate your architecture. Businesses have the choice between various technologies on the market to achieve this geographically diverse solution.
Some virtualization platform providers offer solutions that work only within their own stack, and older technologies that use snapshots might be limited in their compatibility with newer demands. Then, there are hardware solutions that offer specific functions, but replicating at the hypervisor level is going to be the most practical method.
To integrate a proper BDCR strategy, replication should be asynchronous utilizing specialized software that is based on continuous data protection (CDP) and runs at the hypervisor level. There’s no investing in any hardware, and the solution only takes a short amount of time.
Preparing for the Worst
According to recent climate data, these frequent natural disasters, and thereby outages, are here to stay. Not having solutions or a plan in place is deadly for business, and if not taken seriously, could lead to data loss and IT failures.
Before a natural disaster creates a business disaster, companies need to invest and secure their infrastructure with geo-redundancy. Keeping your workloads active and online is vital to business and the end-user experience.