Is Your Data Center Equipped for a Disaster? Server Movers Can Help

by Stephanie Faris on Monday, February 09 6:00

No area of the world is completely immune to a disaster. Whether your risk is a fire, flood, hurricane, tornado, earthquake, or all of the above, it s important to have contingencies in place to make sure your valuable business data would survive. Server movers often help businesses assess their needs and determine weaknesses.

Even if you ve been told your data center is in a completely disaster-proof location, you should still be prepared. No building is completely immune to Mother Nature, especially if conditions are severe. Either your data center or your offices could be inaccessible for days, so it s important to plan for the worst.

Alternate Accessibility

Even the most solid data center won t help your business if your employees can t access files. If a disaster wiped out your office building, where would your employees work? Long before it becomes necessary to do so, your server moving company can ensure every employee has a secondary way to access files outside of the office. This may mean setting up employees to access files from home when absolutely necessary, as well as finding a way to forward your phones to an alternate location.

For situations where operations will need to continue for an extended period of time, you ll need to come up with an alternate working location. This could be at one of your regional offices, if you have one, or at a nearby office building. National office space leasing company Regus now has a workplace recovery program that provides temporary workspace for businesses impacted by a disaster.

Data Retrieval

As soon as a disaster happens, you ll need to be able to remotely access the latest versions of all of your documents. Your team will need this access, as well. Even if you ve set up daily backups for your entire file system, what happens if all of your servers are wiped out? Ideally, your servers will be backed up to a remote location that can be used as an access point if something should happen to your original data center.

Through the use of server mirroring, you can set up a secondary server for use in emergency situations. Make sure this mirrored server is in a completely separate location ideally in a building across the country. Since a major disaster can impact an entire city, having a secondary server down the street may not be useful.

Application Retrieval

If your business relies on any specialized applications to conduct daily operations, you should make sure the application could be accessed if your data center takes a hit. Many businesses use cloud-hosted applications now, so those applications may not be an issue unless access goes through a local server.

A server moving company can help your business determine what applications would be at risk in the event of a disaster. With a full disaster recovery risk assessment, you can begin the process of creating a disaster recovery plan, which is essential for any business to have in place. By working with qualified server movers, you can make sure you don t miss any important things as you put your plan together.