As part of its Queensland flood coverage last month, CRN featured the State Library in Brisbane which managed to execute an effective disaster recovery plan which saved its collections and its IT systems, even as water entered its basement.
“It was all about following basic procedures,” said client services director Rory McLeod.
“Once we knew water encroached into the basements we knew there was a chance that we would lose power so it was about getting [backup power] checked and online and taking down essential systems as quickly as we could.”
The library systems were replicated and a library principle is “lots of copies keeps stuff safe - so it’s quite easy for us to point people at different servers at other state libraries”, he said.
His confidence in being able to recover in the face of disaster was reinforced by a written and annually updated disaster plan that included what to do to physically secure and protect an installation and how to handle the inevitable staff absences at a time of great stress. It included disaster scenario planning procedures to cater for contingencies.
But not all organisations were as confident in their abilities to come back from the brink, an Acronis report released last month found. It showed that boardrooms were denying Australia’s IT departments the backing they needed to recover swiftly in the event of a disaster.
Despite spending around the middle of the heap of the 13 countries surveyed, Australian IT workers said lack of board support sapped them of confidence their organisations could weather disaster.
Here at CRN we wondered whether the catastrophic floods in Queensland and Victoria may have made disaster recovery more front of mind with businesses, so we asked some leading providers if there had been a recent change in the number of inquiries about cloud computing as a solution.
Next: Sam Forbes, managing director, 6YS vs Ilkka Tales (pictured), managing director, Anittel
Sam Forbes
Managing director, 6YS
The recent floods have prompted an increase in the number of inquiries regarding cloud computing. As you would expect, some inquiries have come from flood affected businesses. But we have also seen an increase in general inquiries. While these haven’t been specifically addressed as inquiries relating to disaster recovery I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are seeing an uptick in interest.
Perhaps that’s not surprising given the media coverage and the number of cloud providers advertising assistance. I think what has really captured attention is coverage of businesses working in the cloud that has highlighted their ability to keep working through the crisis. A light bulb has gone off for some people where they are now thinking about business continuity instead of disaster recovery; that is, a shift from how to recover from an outage to avoiding one altogether.
The nature of this disaster really highlighted the issue of access and power. If your equipment is safe but you can’t access it because your office is unusable or doesn’t have power, you still face an outage. Perhaps not a critical outage but enough that it’s getting people to look around at options.
There are many factors a business considers in making the shift to a cloud environment. Businesses are not going to move to the cloud solely for the DR benefits. But the appeal of a service that doesn’t go down has certainly captured business attention
Ilkka Tales
Managing director, Anittel
There is a definite move towards cloud-based disaster recovery solutions. Both small and large clients see the benefit of automated, encrypted, off-site backups, but it tends to be part of a larger, integrated cloud-based offering.
Customers are seeing the benefits that WAN and cloud solutions can provide, particularly for improvements in mobility and productivity. The number of enquiries for cloud offerings has been particularly strong for us over the last two months, but I’m sure this is more to do with growing interest in the concept, coupled with strengthened awareness of Anittel in the marketplace.
What is changing is the recognition that, besides all the day to day operational benefits, the cloud has a role in disaster recovery too. There might have been some hesitancy in the past because companies of all sizes were sceptical about storing data off-site, but that attitude is definitely shifting.
Our recommendation in the past has been, for ultimate peace of mind, to use a combination of an on-site and cloud based solution, but we are seeing more customers moving to a cloud-only approach, because it’s easy to maintain and lower cost. It’s also becoming more viable with the increased functionality of cloud-based applications.
But the cloud will only ever be part of a full IT offering. In terms of disaster recovery, for larger clients we will always work on-site to take an image of servers then use an on-line solution to transfer new data and update versions.
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