‘Resiliency Is Necessary For The Internet To Survive Climate Change,’ says Forbes magazine. We agree. In the last few years, we’ve seen more and more extreme weather events, with more predicted to come.
Temporary outages from damaged or destroyed cellular towers and local cables are one thing; damage to infrastructure is another. Flood or fire damage to a network operation centre, fibre backbone or other critical transmission equipment could potentially knock out internet access to entire areas for a span of days.
For example, during the summer 2020–21 east coast bushfires, both telco and NBN services were disrupted, highlighting the need for redundancy and resilience. In response to those fires the federal government made several important commitments to improving our networks’ resilience, notably to improve regional telecommunications resilience and to boost temporary infrastructure capabilities.
But it’s not only a regional problem. As 2022’s heavy rain and floods have shown, cities can be just as vulnerable to extreme weather events as the country.
Cloud resilience is the answer
There’s not much a business owner can do to address major internet outages – if your local backbone is knocked out, then it’s knocked out.
What business owners can address is their business’s readiness and ability to operate as smoothly as possible. There’s value in keeping some IT capabilities on-premises, ironically to guard against any unexpected connectivity problems and provide redundancy in case of a total connectivity loss.
But there’s even greater value in migrating those capabilities to a secure, robust and resilient cloud platform. It’ll give you peace of mind knowing there are multiple redundant instances and backups of your data, and that you’ll be able to continue your data-based operations (such as taking orders, communicating with staff and customers, and making financial transactions) even if your physical premises is underwater or on fire.
CIO magazine emphasises three aspects of IT resilience:
- Continuous availability: “continuous availability means that whatever happens, be it a cyberattack, flood or planned outage, both you and your customers stay ‘on’ and protected against disruption.”
- Workload mobility: “it’s increasingly important that IT teams have easy, seamless and risk-free workload mobility to unlock on-premises environments that can extend data centers to the cloud.”
- Multi-cloud, hybrid cloud agility: “creating a strategy that includes multi- and hybrid-cloud enables you to use cloud to accelerate business and take advantage of its benefits.”
Resilience, not recovery
Forbes points out that while all businesses should have disaster recovery plans in place, that’s not a business continuity strategy. Business continuity depends on resilience, the ability to withstand unforeseen events and keep operating regardless.
Here at Eagle360 our cloud platform of choice – the one we use in-house and recommend to our partners and clients – is Microsoft Azure. It provides multiple redundancy options for your storage account; choosing which are best for your business depends on:
- How your data is replicated in the primary region.
- Whether your data is replicated to a second region
- Whether your application requires read access to replicated data in the second region if the primary region is unavailable.
Whatever measures you take, we believe Azure is the best platform to take them on. We use it ourselves so if you’re curious, or have any questions, we can answer them based on real-world experience. So please drop us a line – we’re happy to talk and would love to help your business boost its IT resilience.