Systems failure and the resultant systems unavailability or down time is a risk all business need to defend against.
With so many systems online, businesses need to take the necessary precautions to ensure their systems are available as customers are interacting and transacting with you from all over the world 24 hours a day, every day.
A recent article published by NetworkWorld, details the adventures of a poor soul who accidentally deleted his company’s DNS zone which resulted in system down time. As DNS is the protocol managing communication on a network, including the Internet, this human error resulted in all were company systems were unavailable during this down time for his organisation.
While the article hastens to clarify that not all was lost, the company had backups and were able to recover from the outage after a particular period of downtime. But what is kept as a minor point in the story is that the last backup was from a week prior – which means a full week of data was lost.
A question all businesses should ask themselves is ‘How much down time and data loss can I afford?”
To answer this question, you need to know how much revenue your organisation loses for every minute of down time. It is however not that simple as there are indirect consequences to systems down time which are much more difficult to calculate. Down time also negatively affects the confidence in your brand as customers equate any down time to business instability.
Due to the fact very few systems are standalone, down time in an internal non-customer facing or non-transaction system could impact services which are transactional or customer facing. Businesses should therefore carefully consider the scope of their disaster recovery and high availability solutions to ensure all risks are mitigated as best as possible.
Zettagrid delivers Australia’s most advanced self-service platform which includes a Disaster Recovery service built to provide high availability to customers ensuring both the direct and indirect consequences of down time is diminished.
Another consequence of a systems failure is the possibility of data loss, as mentioned before. Businesses have traditionally backed up data on a regular schedule e.g. once a day. Should a systems failure occur, and a data restore needs to take place, any data created after the last successful backup will be lost.
In modern digital society any form of data loss not only affects your internal operations but could affect your customers as well. The internal consequences of data loss would be the lost man hours in recreating the data, if this is even possible. The external consequences could much worse.
For example, let’s assume you offer an online registration service on your website where customers log in and interact or even transact with you. A data loss event where you are forced to restore yesterday’s version of the website’s data would have dire consequences as now your customers have lost data along with you.
In today’s online world data loss needs to be prevented at all costs. Businesses should invest in systems which offer high availability and continuous data replication which prevent the possibility of data loss.
Zettagrid offers multiple products with the features and benefits you need to help you build solutions for data replication, data backup and disaster recovery.
Zettagrid’s platform is built on high availability and redundancy with availability zones in Perth, Sydney, Melbourne and Jakarta so utilising their platform ensures you have a disaster recovery solution which is free of location-based risks.
Going back to the article published by NetworkWorld, had the organisation in question been using Zettagrid Backup or Replication, they would have been able to recover rapidly from this unfortunate outage caused by human error.
The problem you have with an event which causes data loss is there is no cure. Once the data is gone, it is gone. With such advanced, innovative and affordable Zettagrid Backup and DR solutions available, losing a week of data is unacceptable in this day and age.
The fact is humans make mistakes and systems fail, so solutions need to be put in place to mitigate these risks. With fast RPOs and RTOs, you can minimise the amount of data loss experienced if you had to fail over.
It is a far better option to invest in a Zettagrid high availability solution so you never have to find out what an outage could truly cost your business.