The importance of DRP for Data Center
In the final years of the last millennium, ten out of ten IT professionals were involved in adjusting and correcting what became famous as the millennium buga programming failure that predicted only two digits as the year number, and that would take all of our computers back to 1900 instead of recording the year 2000.
The catastrophe was announced, but the effort of projects that involved millions of professionals from the most diverse areas, neutralized the threat and the first New Year's Eve of this century was something relatively quiet despite the late-night shifts.
But the first decade of the 21st century showed that the challenge would be even greater, with the massive computerization of companies, other concerns began to emerge, such as data storage, maintaining a redundant infrastructure and creating a business continuity plan. This process was accelerated by two major tragedies.
On September 11, 2001, the United States saw its World Trade Center twin towers collapse in the country's largest terrorist attack. Companies were completely destroyed and, even those that had survivors, had no information to continue their business. Several companies had a redundancy plan, including a backup Data Center, but in the next door building.
Four years later, it was the turn of a natural disaster to devastate the city of New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina was the sixth most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic and the one that caused most destruction when touching American soil in all history, and in this case, hundreds of companies disappeared from the map, as their structures were without a recovery plan or, when they did, they were in the same city.
These two major and catastrophic events have led IT managers around the world to create standards, procedures and best practices for the strategy of the disaster recovery plan, known as DRP (disaster recovery plan). Especially companies that are listed on the stock exchange and financial institutions that need to be aware that they are regulated by the Sarbanes Oxley Act.disaster recovery plan). Principalmente empresas que estão listadas na bolsa de valores e instituições financeiras precisam estar atentas por estarem reguladas pela Lei Sarbanes Oxley.
Regarding the Data Center infrastructure, what are the main recommendations? The first and main one is to maintain a replicated infrastructure with a minimum distance of 30 miles or 50 kilometers from the main Data Center. In this way, your data would be protected from attacks, natural disasters and, in general, it will be in an electrical infrastructure coming from another network, and even your telecommunications connections will be connected at another access point.
History shows us that it is necessary to preserve data and mitigate the most unlikely situations, even if it seems a very remote risk, mitigating these risks is more an obligation of the IT manager and it can be a watershed between the survival or not of the business.
Gustavo Moraes, Infra IES’ director. Operating in the Data Center market for 25 years.
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