Ensuring that disaster recovery is not a DISASTER
Everything goes wrong.
It’s obvious but many of us work as if our IT equipment is faultless. That it will never go wrong. We act shocked when all the information that our business requires to operate disappears with the failure of a hard disk or a USB stick or a theft. This normally means the end of the business, too.
So it is refreshing to know that some IT suppliers take a sensible approach.
For instance, here is a recent email from Salesforce.
What is a site switch and what action is required to prepare?
Each Salesforce instance is built and maintained in two geographically separate locations. An instance is actively served from one location (the active site) with transactions replicating in near real-time to the other completely redundant location (the ready site). During a site switch, we swap the locations of your ready and active sites; the ready site becomes the new active site and vice versa.
So if one of their data centres fails you continue working based of another data centre.
None of your data is stored on your computer, so a theft does not matter.
If only everything in life was as reliable as Salesforce. (And when it fails it still keeps on working!)
As I say to our customers: if two data centres fail, you probably have even more important things on your mind than your data.