Critical use cases for Data Centre connectivity: Disaster Recovery

Calculating the effect of downtime and data loss is not a simple exercise. Some effects are more easily quantifiable than others. Here are a few that stand out: revenue loss; compliance and reporting penalties; service level penalties; brand impact and loss of reputation. A pretty powerful list of reasons why a business needs a robust DR plan - so why is it such a problem?

The balance for IT professionals is to always to weigh up and communicate the cost of disaster recovery against the impact of these potential losses. Since investments like DR are typically related to cost avoidance, businesses have been typically reluctant to fund such efforts. But now the advent of on demand data centre connectivity is changing the equation for the better.

Quite often, second, third, and fourth data centres are built by those organisations that can afford it to improve data resilience. One of the biggest drivers for building multiple data centres is to avoid a complete loss of service due to a natural catastrophe, power failure, equipment failure, or network failure. However, the cost of permanently providing high speed connections between these data centres can push the limits of the business case - and sometimes leads to connections being specified that are too slow for the task. Some sort of resilience is better than none - right? Which it is, until what the business expected to be a resilient DR implementation evolves into a best-efforts degraded service.

On Demand services provide a more effective IT framework for disaster recovery. In a typical scenario, you could deploy a number of dormant, low commit 10Mbps (minimum commit) connections at much lower cost. When an incident occurs, you then increase the bandwidth of a required connection up to 1Gbps in near real time, minimizing any impact as a result of the disaster. Once the situation is stable again, you can then turn the service back down giving fast, flexible and agile response.

With Colt's DCNet On Demand data centre inter-connectivity service, we offer award winning Ethernet services between key data centres across Europe. Our self-service portal allows you to provision connections instantly, expand into new data centre locations across Europe and Asia, and scale your bandwidth in real time. To learn more please click here.