By Patrick Kinsella, VP Technology for 1Path
Nearly all of us who live or work in, or have ties to Atlanta experienced fallout resulting from the technology outage that affected one of the most storied and respected brands in Atlanta’s history: Delta Air Lines. It is easy to understand the level of frustration expressed by travelers as their itineraries were severely disrupted. However, as a local IT leader, I couldn’t help but empathize with Delta’s IT team as they face the consequences of this disruption.
Most of all, I asked myself the same question I’m sure every IT leader around the globe did early Monday morning: Am I doing everything I should to protect my business from the inevitable random failure of technology we depend on?
In addition to all the commonly known best practices for disaster recovery, such as application continuity and geographic redundancy, I’d like to share my TOP 5 things to consider when assessing your readiness:
- Don’t fear the cloud
- Cloud architecture offers many options for enterprise-level redundancy at a fraction of the total cost of ownership of building your own
- Private cloud is a viable option for businesses with more stringent regulatory environments
- Identify ALL single points of failure
- Redundancy can be useless if it depends on equipment in a single facility
- Don’t forget to evaluate power and cooling systems, incoming circuit pathways (Can one backhoe take out my primary and redundant connections?)
- Test, test, test – did I say test?
- If your business is afraid of your D/R testing, your redundancy likely isn’t adequate for the needs of the business
- Communicate the risks appropriately to the business
- Train the entire team on contingency scenarios
- Delta brought in hundreds of additional employees to minimize the impact to customers in airports and respond quickly to inquiries via social media. Is your team prepared?
1Path is the one source for all things to do with designing, deploying and supporting technology – from cable to cloud. We bring more horsepower, more commitment, and a more complete game plan to our customers to make it easier to get hard things done like business continuity planning and testing.
I am proud to have partnered with our own Managed Services team to provide the same business continuity planning and testing to 1Path that we offer to our customers, and it certainly helps me sleep more soundly at night while our business continues to operate 24x7x365.
-PK
Patrick Kinsella
