30
Sep, 2015
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4 Scenarios to Consider On Disaster Preparedness Day

b2ap3_thumbnail_business_sabotage_400.jpgSeptember was National Disaster Preparedness Month, and as such, it’s important to consider the state of your business’s current backup and disaster recovery practices. Different disasters pose various threats for your organization, but many of them have one thing in common: they’re going to ruin your physical IT infrastructure, and, depending on your backup practices, could potentially bring down your entire operational infrastructure.

Here are four of the most common natural disasters that drastically affect IT systems, and what you can do to prevent them from causing permanent damage.

Power Outages
Fierce storms are often enough to cause quite a bit of damage to businesses that haven’t taken the proper precautions. If power lines go down, you run the risk of losing electricity. This could result in your machines unexpectedly powering down, and you losing information or even causing damage to the hardware. Using an uninterrupted power supply, or UPS, can help to keep your systems up and running long enough to save any files that are being worked on. This helps to prevent damage from unexpected power-downs.

Floods and Tropical Storms
Again, storms, hurricanes, and heavy rainfall in general is enough to create problems for businesses along the coast, on bodies of water, or near rivers. Unexpected flooding is enough to cause extensive water damage, wash out foundations of buildings, and, of course, fry any technology it comes into contact with. This means that floods can potentially cost your business in not just physical repairs to your building, but also in replacing vital hardware systems.

To avoid water damage to your office’s equipment, consider placing your vital technology components in an elevated location, away from the floor. This will help keep them safe from a couple inches of water, if the flood infiltrates your building. Still, the best way to prepare for flood damage is to keep an off-site backup of your data infrastructure. This makes sure that your data isn’t wiped out by an unpredictable natural disaster.

Earthquakes
Earthquakes have the potential to be even more devastating for businesses, especially if you’re located somewhere that is known to experience periodic violent quakes. With the power to level entire buildings, your business could be at constant risk of both physical infrastructure damage and data loss.

Implementing a reliable backup and disaster recovery solution is required if you want to ensure that your data is safely stored off-site, somewhere earthquakes shouldn’t be able to reach it. You can also switch to cloud computing and virtualization tactics for your primary mode of data and application distribution, which decreases the amount of physical infrastructure networking you need to stay productive.

Fires
Just like earthquakes, a fire is one of the more damaging disasters that could hit your business. If your building were to catch fire, there’s a risk of everything you hold dear being destroyed: data, hardware, and even your physical location. Thankfully, you can at least save your data from destruction by using a backup and disaster recovery solution.

These are only a few disasters that could strike your business’s IT infrastructure. If you want to optimize your chances of making it through disasters like these unscathed, give NuTech Services a call at 810.230.9455 for more information about our backup and disaster recovery solutions.

18
Sep, 2015
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Not Even Google is Exempt From Data Loss Disasters

b2ap3_thumbnail_lightning_google_data_center_400.jpgWhen you store your data in the cloud, you assume it will be safe and that nothing bad will happen to it. But what if the real clouds hovering above your virtual cloud are literally full of lightning? Google experienced this last month when one of its data centers in Belgium fell to the wrath of Zeus.

Maybe the Greek god of lightning was insulted by a video of him uploaded to YouTube? It’s hard to know for sure the cause of the strike, but what we do know is that the charred data center is primarily used to host Google’s Cloud Platform, and on that fateful evening it sustained four consecutive lightning strikes, one after another.

As terrifying as a lightning strike sounds, for Google, the scariest part of the whole ordeal was that five percent of its disks in the center could no longer read or write data, equating to a loss of 0.000001 percent of the center’s total data. Regarding this data, Google issued a statement saying, “In these cases, full recovery is not possible.”

Such a small amount of data lost may not sound like a big deal, but that’s because it wasn’t your data that was lost. When it comes to data, you don’t have to have your entire infrastructure wiped out for your bottom line to be hurt. Instead, all it takes is a fraction of your mission-critical files to be erased for your entire workflow to be thrown off. Therefore, it’s crucial to have a backup and recovery plan in place for all of your files.

One would assume that a giant company like Google with such deep pockets would have taken precautions in order to prevent something like this from happening. To Google’s credit, they do have safeguards in place to protect themselves from regular lighting strikes (a common occurrence for data centers), but nothing could have prepared them for this quadruple-electric whammy.

Despite the obscene chance of this ever happening again (you know what they say, “four consecutive lightning bolts never strike the same data center twice”), Google has assured its users that they’re making upgrades to prevent any future incidents of this nature. Although, we’re sure that even the best efforts of Google will be puny and ineffective compared to what the mighty Zeus can dish out!

Contact NuTech Services at 810.230.9455 for a Backup and Disaster Recovery solution that will protect your company’s data from everything on this side of Mount Olympus.