As a longtime resident of California I have seen the impact of the current drought first hand. There has been little to no snow in the Sierras, lake levels are low, and there’s been a change in my water supplier due to the lack of water. For the past few months there has been a lot of speculation about the chance of El Niño hitting California and hopefully alleviating the current drought conditions. As of this past week there is a 95 percent chance El Niño will arrive, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
El Niño occurs when tropical Pacific Ocean trade winds die out and ocean temperatures become warmer than normal. Although we desperately need water in California, El Niño will bring vast amounts of water to the state within a very short period of time, potentially causing floods and landslides in parts of Southern California. When the storm hits during the 2015-2016 winter, businesses located in the southern half of the United States and Southern California must be ready for disaster recovery. Heavy rains and strong winds can cause severe damage to structures, destroying the business-critical data inside.
In today’s marketplace companies are looking to partner with someone that can protect all of their data, wherever it is, and in all conditions, including man-made disasters and natural disasters such as El Niño. Offering an end-to-end data protection solution is critical for both disaster recovery and a company’s success during a disaster or natural phenomenon, whether unexpected and expected (just because a disaster is expected doesn’t mean it won’t cause damage; remember, El Niño is expected!). The cloud is a great way for businesses to be prepared for a potential disaster. But there’s more to the cloud than just backed up data. It’s also about what you can do with that backed up data.
Remember, backup is only part of the equation to safeguarding your data. What happens should your business need to recover its data? Perhaps the better question is this: If your business needs to recover lost data after a disaster, how quickly can you do a restore? Time is of the essence because you want to be up and running as quickly as possible. One study reports that a company that experiences a computer outage lasting for more than 10 days will never fully recover financially and that 50 percent of companies suffering such a predicament will be out of business within 5 years.
Any type of disaster can destroy your business by destroying your computers, servers, and the data they hold. But your business can be prepared. As an essential component of the data-protection-everywhere strategyembedding cloud into everything is critical. Customers should be able to tier their entire portfolio of applications and data to the cloud, including virtual, and born-in-the-cloud workloads.
When planning for an event such as El Niño, businesses would do well to heed the advice of Alexander Graham Bell, who said, “Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.” And if you’ll permit me to revise that a bit: the right preparation is key to success. In other words, don’t buy an umbrella for the storm when what you really need is the cloud. Make sure you have an appropriate data protection solution in place for all of your critical data no matter where it is or how it is generated. Before the storm hits, be sure that your data is protected.
