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Whether it’s earthquakes, wildfires, tornadoes, tropical storms, or hurricanes, we all have our own weather and natural disaster worries.

The Eastern Pacific hurricane season officially began May 15, and the Atlantic season kicks off June 1. Weather analysts at Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Science estimate that the 2022 Atlantic hurricane season will be an active one that produces 19 named storms, nine hurricanes, and four major hurricanes.

I’m writing this as I make my way to COMMON POWERUp in New Orleans, Louisiana – a city with a famous weather disaster in its past. Funny enough, the reason I’m on my way to New Orleans is to speak about disaster recovery (DR) case studies and the business value of HA Solutions. While my sessions at POWERUp will cover this more in-depth, I’ll touch on a few ways to ensure your IBM i DR strategy is complete in this article. Hopefully, this is helpful as Mother Nature gets ready to make summer memorable – Again!

Comprehensive Disaster Recovery

Fully documented and tested Disaster Recovery keeps bad things from happening to good companies. Disaster recovery will not only protect your organization’s most vital asset – your data but it will also develop business continuity organizationally. Disaster Recovery is your last line of defense against severe business impacts regardless of the circumstances.

A comprehensive disaster recovery strategy is a business imperative in 2022. Business leaders understand this, with the latest HelpSystems IBM i Marketplace Survey reporting 59 percent of respondents ranking Disaster Recovery a top priority – second only to cybersecurity and ransomware (62 percent).

Managed service providers, like Connectria, take DR planning pretty seriously. It’s our job to protect our customers’ environments. But in order for us to be successful, your team should also take DR seriously. Gone are the days of haphazard backup and DR plans. While you might think you can do it alone, the truth is securing your data and backups requires more than physical backups, hopes, and dreams.

Unplanned Business Impact

Disasters have a dramatic impact on bottom-line revenue, supply chain, and the overall health of your business. Every time an unplanned impact occurs, whether it’s a natural disaster, power interruption, or extended IT services disruption, our businesses get a gut-wrenching reminder of the importance of a tested, repeatable, working disaster recovery solution. A good disaster recovery plan ensures your applications will function the same way they do today.

Ask yourself:

1. Does our DR solution align with today’s business needs?
2. What has changed in the last six months? Year?
3. Does our current DR solution demonstrate confidence to our business that we can recover our IT Systems within stated recovery objectives?

IT must recognize that DR needs to be integrated across the enterprise to mitigate vulnerability and minimize data loss. Companies should also ensure they have committed Like for Like infrastructure that they can recover to, in an alternate FEMA geographic region.

Not If, but When

It can be beneficial to work with a partner who is a leader of Managed DRaaS. Why rely solely on internal teams that have competing priorities when you could work with an expert who is solely focused on providing fail-over and securing environments in advance of a major disaster? At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself how something like a fire or flood could impact your ability to conduct business.

I think the number one benefit of working with a Managed DRaaS leader is because that is their primary focus. When a disaster strikes, your internal and local teams will more than likely be concerned with helping and caring for their friends and family. You can’t rely on them in an emergency which could leave your business-critical data vulnerable.

A Managed DRaaS partner, however, could be counted on to be solely focused on preserving your business functions. They could even be “On Alert” and executing pre-validation activities for your target environments ahead of a disaster. For example, in the event of a disaster, Connectria technical teams are immediately put into action:

• Validating database integrity
• Confirming systems availability for all production servers
• Validating replicated environments in the Connectria cloud
• Ensuring network connectivity and security controls for these systems

All Connectria customers benefit from the experiences gained by our staff in supporting FEMA events. Our frequent testing for emergency situations validates the completeness of our runbooks. Under the pressure of a real disaster, our customers value our years of experience in recovering their enterprise systems.

Before It’s Too Late

Don’t gamble with your company’s future. Connectria can be there to help your organization in the event of a disaster. We offer customers the ability to put our team “On Alert” at no additional cost with no declaration or usage fees. Our DR customers have this option available any time a disaster is imminent.

Contact us below if you have questions about our DR services for your organization. You can also email us at sales@connectria.com or call us at (800)704-4058.

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