News & Blog

Is Your Data Centre Disaster-Proof?

What if Disaster Strikes? Mark Mulcahy – Waterford Technologies As a data centre, your raison d’être is to keep your clients’ data

What if Disaster Strikes?

Mark Mulcahy – Waterford Technologies

As a data centre, your raison d’être is to keep your clients’ data safe and to keep their businesses up and running. But what if disaster strikes?

You might not think that the UK is rife with freakish natural disasters – there’s certainly not usually anything on the scale of, say, Hurricane Sandy taking out Datagram and sending the Huffington Post, Gawker, Gizmodo and Buzzfeed websites offline – but according to research commissioned by Zenium Technology Partners in 2015, 45% of UK data centres have suffered a natural disaster.

So what could a storm, flooding, fire, an earthquake, a lightning strike or even a solar flare mean for your data centre? Well, at best it could simply mean a few hours downtime and some unhappy customers to be placated. At worst, it could mean the loss of important data, customer’s businesses being offline for long periods and potentially a loss of clients and revenue for you.

From Squirrels to Burglars!

And that’s only natural disasters. Several other issues have plagued data centres worldwide including squirrels shorting electrics (Yahoo), electrical surges (NSA), vehicles crashing into power cables (Rackspace) or burglars stealing network equipment (Vodafone). In short, there are dozens of expected and unexpected ways your data centre could be compromised, leaving you red-faced with multiple unhappy customers.

Of course, you could look for cloud-based solutions for your data centre customers, providing them with round-the-clock access to their data with just an internet connection. As you’re not reliant on physical data storage, you don’t need worry about physical disasters occurring. Your customers’ data is safely, securely stowed online where hurricanes, burglars and squirrels can’t touch it.

Keeping Everyone Happy

At Waterford, our cloud-based file archiving software assesses data, giving data centres clarity on what they are storing so that they can work out how it is best stored so that it has the appropriate levels of accessibility and security. This in turn allows our customers to make savings which they can pass on to their own clients – everyone’s happy.

And no one needs to worry about a squirrel getting into the internet and breaking it, do they?

Find out more about Waterford’s file archiving solutions