By Laurie Head
AIS Network Vice President
Last October, Hurricane Sandy slammed into the United States, severely impacting millions of businesses and governments and displacing 776,000 East Coast residents. It resulted in an estimated $71.4 billion in damages – the sixth most costly hurricane in U.S. history.
Although Sandy’s meteorological characteristics were unique, the ensuing flooding and wind damage are very similar to the destruction caused by lesser tropical and convective storms typically impacting other regions of the country during hurricane season.
Hurricane Sandy was a powerful reminder of why it’s never too early to shift your business’ focus from reactive response to actually planning for downtime. For businesses that are actively building an IT disaster recovery plan within the context of developing an overall business continuity strategy, there is good news. Newly available approaches to cloud based disaster recovery are offering significant benefits, namely:
- less cost
- better functionality
- easier and more frequent testing (also less costly)
- predictable, pay-as-you-go pricing
- more flexible contracts
AISN customers have reason to celebrate too. Our new cloud-based disaster recovery and online backup processes – powered by Microsoft Windows Server 2012, Microsoft System Center 2012 and Microsoft Hyper-V Replica – are going to make disaster recovery and secure online backup easier and more cost effective, while also offering faster recovery times.
Our customers will also find that these cutting-edge technologies make it simpler to comply with stringent regulations governing electronic storage and access to data — such as those rules defined by Sarbanes-Oxley, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the Health Insurance Profitability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), FISMA, NASD and NYSE.
And, they’ll reap additional benefits when they take advantage of our geographically diverse Tier III and Tier IV data centers, which offer High Availability and increased disaster resilience.
We take considerable care in designing our data protection and recovery systems for the highest levels of security, reliability and scalability. Into any of our custom plans, we integrate a comprehensive set of security measures and practices to keep our customers’ data protected and safe.
The disaster recovery question haunts every business. But proactive planning, in which availability and resiliency are key components, should help mitigate risk. It’s not too late to begin today.