Preparing Your Business For Data Centre Outages

Businesses use data more than ever to reach customers, simplify transactions, and streamline operation processes. Because of this dependence on data, efficient data centres are critical for business success. Unfortunately, like any business system, data centres can go offline for various reasons. These include power outages, natural disasters, technical issues, and human error.

Data center maintenance can cost $100,000 or more, devasting any business, including yours. The losses extend beyond profit. They also include damaged customer trust, loss of productivity, and potential fines caused by a regulatory breach. This clarifies why preparing your business for data centre outages is crucial.

The Data Center Landscape is Not Static

The data centre landscape continues to evolve and advance, but this comes with risks. For instance, as cloud computing becomes more popular, cloud data centre outages can cause major disruptions for businesses that rely solely on IT infrastructure.

Also, as cyberattacks become more sophisticated, data centres are at a higher risk of malware and DDoS attacks. At the same time, climate change is not slowing down. Instead, it leads to severe weather disrupting power grids and infrastructure more frequently.

Moreover, AI is also impacting the data centre landscape. As AI use becomes more prevalent, data centre outages can have a ripple effect on interconnected systems.

Taking Proactive Measures to Protect Your Business During Data Center Outages

The best way to protect your business against all types of data centre outages is to make sure your business is prepared for any eventuality. This means building a business continuity strategy that ensures your business maintains productivity despite a data centre outage.

Risk Assessment

The first step is to conduct a risk assessment to find potential causes of data centre outages. This includes security breaches, equipment malfunctions, human error, and other common reasons. It is also crucial to determine the potential impact of each of these scenarios on your business.

For example, if a natural disaster hits and the data centre goes offline for days. How much revenue will you lose? How much will this scenario impact your customers? How long will it delay your operational processes? Will your business be able to recover from potential damage to its reputation?

Data Backup and Recovery

Once you have established the risks to your business, you must implement a data backup strategy. These protocols may include backing up critical data to a secure offsite location. If the risk of outages is minimal, you could also choose cloud storage for backup.

However, implementing these measures is not enough. You must also test your data recovery processes regularly. The last thing you want is to believe your data can be recovered only to find that it was never backed up properly in the first place.

Ideally, you want an option to immediately restore data, especially if your business heavily relies on data for its day-to-day functions.

Disaster Recovery

It would help if you also have a disaster recovery plan that outlines the actions to be taken should a data centre outage occur. This plan should include assigning recovery team member roles, communication protocols, and backup site activation.

This plan should be regularly updated and reviewed to ensure your business is fully covered in case of an outage.

Redundancy Is a Must

Your preparations should include redundant hardware and software systems. For data centres, this means minimizing single points of failure by implementing redundant power supplies, network connections, and cooling systems. Redundancy ensures that one component failure does not blow the entire system.

Consider using data centres in different locations. You can replicate data across these centres to protect your business during outages.

Training All Staff

Your staff must receive training on disaster recovery procedures. If you assign roles, each staff member must be sufficiently trained on what to do during an outage.

Again, practice and testing are crucial. Hold regular simulation drills to ensure your staff is prepared during a data centre outage.

Getting To the Other Side of a Data Center Outage

Communication will get your business through a data centre outage crisis. Decide on how you will inform customers and stakeholders of an outage. This notification must include a timeline for when your business will return online and must be sent out via different communication channels, including social media.

Put your business-critical functions first and keep them going manually while your recovery plan kicks in.

Even with modern technologies, there is no getting away from data centre outages. Their impact can be devastating, but by preparing your business for such an event, you can get to the other side unscathed.