Sometimes, March comes in like a lion and goes out like one, too. Winter isn’t over yet simply because the calendar says it’s spring. Even well into March and April, the Northeast often encounters severe wintery weather. For example, Winter Storm Stella hit in March 2017, bringing hurricane-force winds and up to 2 feet of snowfall to the Northeast.
This winter has been particularly harsh. A so-called bombogenesis (a rapidly strengthened ocean storm) recently affected blizzard conditions inland. Winter storm warnings have been a regular occurrence. Inclement weather can intensify quickly, giving little time to prepare.
The elevated risk of extreme weather conditions in the Northeast means companies need to arm themselves with a robust disaster recovery strategy that protects against outages and data loss during a natural disaster.
The Wrath of Wintery Weather
Winter and early spring in New England bring blizzards and high winds that can knock out power lines. Without effective disaster recovery, your business can suffer a lengthy outage. Production grinds to a halt, depriving customers and clients of your products and services.
Heavy precipitation events are increasing nationally, especially over the last three to five decades, with the largest increases in the Midwest and Northeast. Heavy snowfall may damage the roof of your building, causing leaks or even a total collapse. As deep snow melts, flooding can occur. Water damage could destroy equipment in your data center, leading to data loss and compromise. Significant damage to your IT infrastructure could take a long time to mediate and repair. Customers may not stick with your company while you work on restoring full operations.
Are Your Defenses Down?
Many companies lack adequate disaster recovery plans. You might ask yourself if your company ranks among these underprepared companies. How confident are you that your current disaster recovery strategy will enable you to get back up and running quickly when disaster strikes? When was the last time you tested your disaster recovery solution? If it was more than a year ago, you may be out of luck the next time you experience an outage.
Preparing the Best Defense
Companies in the Northeast need to prepare for the chance of a weather-related natural disaster by turning to cloud for disaster recovery. Cloud disaster recovery provides geographical diversity along with quick recovery times to keep your company running reliably. If a blizzard or flood strikes your main data center, your cloud resources will escape its effects.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) enables your company to replicate data and deploy a backup environment without needing to construct a second physical data center. Instead, you can provision affordable infrastructure resources in the cloud and scale as needed.
Continuous data protection ensures that your production site and DR site are in sync, allowing you to achieve an aggressive Recovery Point Objective (RPO). DRaaS also allows for full recovery in the cloud in just minutes, giving your organization the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) that you need for true business continuity. After a natural disaster, you can feel confident that you are making decisions based on accurate, complete, and current data.
Finding the Right DRaaS Provider
The Northeast has unique disaster recovery challenges. The winter storm season stretches from October into April, creating a huge window of time during which companies may be vulnerable to outages. Once winter is over, will April showers bring flood damage? By summer, the region may experience the effects of hurricanes that travel up the East Coast. But it’s worth noting that it may not be the major storm or natural disaster that will take down your data center. It could easily be an everyday type of outage like hardware / software failure, power loss or accidental deletion.
FirstLight understands the disaster recovery demands of enterprise companies, so we offer a cloud-based solution. FirstLight’s DRaaS combines replication and recovery software with robust cloud computing infrastructure for reliable and lightning-fast disaster recovery. Our fiber optic network provides ample bandwidth and ultra-low latency to support ongoing replication as well as the ability to connect to the cloud DR site when you need to use it.
Check out FirstLight’s DRaaS solutions, use our downtime calculator to find out how much a downtime event could cost your organization, and watch our video explaining how FirstLight guards agains downtime scenarios.
