Blog

Try to imagine a large crowd of customers arriving at your business, only to find a closed sign and the shutters down. As you helplessly watch potential clients walking off into the distance towards your competitors, you could also be faced with the realisation that you are paying for your employees to sit idly at their desks.

When entering damage control or making up for the lost time, the costs of repair expenses and brand damage can quickly mount up. The increasing costs of downtime to a company also highlight the importance of achieving the elusive 100% uptime figure. But, is this a realistic goal?

A technical failure or cyber-attack can and probably will occur when you least expect it. Unscheduled downtime can affect businesses of any size and will often arise from multiple sources that are difficult to predict or control.

The inconvenient truth is that even the biggest tech giants are not immune to the dreaded outage. This is something that European users of Microsoft's Outlook recently learned to their chagrin when they found themselves unable to access their emails for the day. There are countless examples in the last few months that highlight how even Amazon's AWS servers and Microsoft's Azure are far from infallible.

A list including heavyweights such as Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter creates an argument that there is no such thing as a single hosting provider with 100% uptime. But, this depends entirely on how achieving high availability is approached.

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” Warren Buffet

In a mobile-first always-online digital world, 100% availability is now a matter of business-critical importance. These are just a handful of reasons why we enable replication into zones to remove the need for secondary data centers and duplicate IT equipment while also eliminating risk.

For example, our Zettagrid data centers are located in zones in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, and Jakarta to deliver genuine operational diversity to any organisation. This approach offers greater preparedness and overall organisational resilience for leaders looking for peace of mind.

Unfortunately, businesses are also increasingly being hit by a variety of cyber-attacks such as denial-of-service and ransomware that can cripple an entire organisation if they are unprepared. The ability to replicate into other geographic zones and ensuring business continuity is rapidly becoming a get out of jail free card for the inevitable occurs.

Primarily, SecondSite protects a client's IT setup from corruption by running a cloned environment in Zettagrid's cloud until the primary site recovers. This approach enables a failover to be completed within a few minutes to ensure that a company will experience next to no impact. Our goal is to deliver a complete failover into a different zone without end users even knowing about it.

An affordable, scalable and quick disaster recovery solution should be attainable to businesses of all sizes now that system uptime is considered table stakes by most companies. At Zettagrid, we believe that 100% uptime is achievable by using SecondSite to recover in real-time, reduce the cost of downtime, and minimise interruptions to operations.

A few years ago, businesses adopted a naive mindset of migrating everything to the cloud so that keeping the lights on became somebody else's problem. However, there is a realisation that they need to work in close collaboration with their virtual landlords to ensure there are no single points of failure.

IT managers have been chasing 100% uptime for years. What was once perceived as a nothing but a myth is finally achievable. Advances in disaster recovery technology are enabling leaders to take their eggs out of their one proverbial basket and instantly failover to another geographical location.

Achieving 100% availability is no longer just an IT pipe dream, it's an expectation. Failure to make it a reality is not an option and could even be the difference between your company thriving as a business or going under.

How are you preparing and protecting your business from any unplanned, unexpected and inevitable outages that will take your business offline? Please share your experiences and valuable insights by commenting below.

Find out more about SecondSite Disaster Recovery here.