Power outages: Seven tips against data loss
It has become cold in Switzerland, and energy consumption is rising accordingly. Even though complete power outages are currently considered a scenario with a low probability of occurrence, experts from IT service providers nevertheless advise preparing for them.
The risks for power outages are difficult to assess. Therefore, companies should better prepare for their operations being limited or interrupted by a power outage in the data center or server room. They should review their disaster recovery plans now and adapt them to the new situation. Wolfgang Huber, head of the DACH region at Cohesity, a provider of data management and security solutions, offers seven tips on how companies can protect themselves and their data in the event of a blackout.
- #1 Prepare use of battery and diesel generators.: In the event of an emergency, battery accumulators must be charged and diesel generators topped up in order to reliably supply a data center with power. These preparations should be checked regularly.
- #2 Personnel planningDisaster recovery tests prepare IT teams to deal with data loss, but in an emergency, they have to switch the power in the data center to generators and back again for weeks. Data center staffing plans must ensure that operations run smoothly.
- #3 Implement governance frameworks like COBIT: The single point of failure means that the failure of a single component can endanger the entire server system. The standardized framework COBIT provides best practices for analyzing and testing these points of failure. This ensures that companies test, understand and document every element in the IT stack.
- #4 Make data inventory: How much and what data is stored where? A precise overview of the company's data, the dependencies between data processing and storage, and the provision of services is crucial. This is the only way to understand which critical workflows depend on external infrastructures that could be lost in the event of a power failure.
- #5 Keep regulations in view: Data protection and legal requirements - i.e. governance and compliance - must also be strictly adhered to when data is moved due to an emergency. This requires a clear picture of data storage for companies. For personal data, the Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sets out the rules for this.
- #6 Automate as much as possible: Looking to the future, companies need to introduce modern data management solutions. This allows all workloads and data services to be managed automatically on one control plane via a single user interface. This saves IT teams time and resources when they need to move data and applications to alternative storage locations.
- #7 Practice makes perfect: Proper preparation is key - IT and management teams must work together in a smooth and orderly manner in the event of an emergency. To do this, everyone must be on the same level of knowledge at all times regarding potential risks and data management. For this reason, the company should conduct regular exercises and simulations.
Data Management as a Service (DMaaS) offers are a flexible and reliable solution for protecting against power outages. Critical data is stored at an alternative location. This means that companies no longer have to implement and manage the infrastructure entirely themselves and can concentrate on other business-critical tasks, especially in the event of an emergency.
