As Hurricane Milton bears down on Florida, there will be more than a few IT professionals scrambling to ensure applications remain available. Fortunately, in the age of the cloud these types of storms, at least from an IT perspective, are not as catastrophic as they once were.
Organizations, of course, will still need to ensure that employees are safe and have access to the equipment and networks they need to access applications in the cloud, but in the wake of a series of catastrophic events many IT organizations are much more prepared to weather a major storm than they were a few short years ago.
Camberly Bates, a chief technology advisor for The Futurum Group, said disaster recovery services as of late have also become more affordable, simply because IT teams donโt necessarily have to set up and manage a separate data center to ensure applications remain available. Instead, IT teams can rely on a set of cloud services to run applications on IT infrastructure that is located thousands of miles away from the point of impact of any storm, she noted.
Additionally, modern application software is more resilient, she added. The biggest challenge is ensuring that communications networks remain accessible to both enable end users to access applications and coordinate the activities of incident response teams, added Bates.
Of course, waiting to the last minute to test whether disaster recovery plans will actually work is asking for trouble. Far too many organizations donโt test their backup and recovery capabilities to ensure they have access to the data needed to run their applications. That may prove more challenging than IT organizations may realize, given the rate at which the volume of data that might need to be made available has increased dramatically in the last few years. Much of that data is also unstructured, which means it may be stored in any number of applications and systems.
Recovering large amounts of data also takes a fair amount of time, so even if applications are available, the business might not be fully operational for several days. IT teams need to ensure that the organizationโs most critical data remains accessible long before disaster strikes.
Undoubtedly, there will be organizations that, for one unforeseen reason or another, will be unable to function simply because the physical premises they rely on to function are underwater or, in the absence of access to a portable generator, there simply is no power available. Additionally, many of their local customers may have issues of their own that, for example, make buying a particular product or service superfluous as they focus on recovering from the storm.
The one thing that is certain is the sooner applications become available the faster any community can start to return to business as usual in an era where both people and organizations have never been more dependent on IT to function and survive. In fact, once everyone is hopefully declared safe, it wonโt be too long before organizations assess how well their IT teams responded to a storm that everyone has seen coming now for the better of a week.