Disasters expose risks of centralized data infrastructure
A company can keep its facilities standing and still be brought to a standstill if a disaster prevents it from accessing its data.
Earthquakes, floods, fires and infrastructure failures can disrupt systems essential to operations, making data availability and backups in different locations central to business continuity.
Losing access to data due to unforeseeable contingencies, such as a disaster, can leave a company unable to operate, even when its facilities remain standing.
Earthquakes, floods, fires or infrastructure failures can take systems that support essential business processes offline. That is why keeping information available and having backups that do not depend on a single physical location has become a component of operational continuity.
“Physical centralization of data is a critical vulnerability. When a flood, fire or infrastructure collapse caused by an earthquake destroys or disables a facility, companies without real data backups do not just lose files; they lose their ability to operate, bill and serve their customers, which in many cases ultimately leads to permanent closure,” says Carla García, Director of New Business at Zoho in Latin America.
Faced with this vulnerability, cloud-based software services can help maintain operational continuity, provided they have mechanisms to back up information and keep it available even when physical infrastructure is taken offline.
Geographic redundancy as disaster protection.
An infrastructure prepared for these scenarios must have high availability and geographic redundancy. In Zoho’s case, the company says it operates its own data centers in different parts of the world and currently has 18 such facilities.
This distribution makes it possible to replicate and back up information across multiple geographic regions. If a natural disaster or a major power failure affects one data center, operations can be redirected to another point in the network, keeping data available to users.
Five measures to protect data.
1) Adopt cloud infrastructure with geographic redundancy. Avoiding backups concentrated in a single physical location or on local servers can reduce the risk of simultaneously losing information and its backups in a disaster.
2) Implement frequent, automated backups. Backups should be performed periodically and automatically to reduce the possibility of losing recent information. It is also necessary to regularly verify that recovery processes work properly when they need to be used.
3) Protect information through encryption and authentication. End-to-end encryption, strict privacy policies and multifactor authentication help protect data from unauthorized access, particularly during crises when security risks may increase.
4) Diversify technology dependencies. Evaluating providers that control their own infrastructure can reduce potential points of failure in the digital supply chain and limit the impact that a third-party outage may have on operations during an emergency.
5) Have a Business Continuity Plan. Preparedness should define roles, secure remote access and emergency communication channels so that teams know how to access essential systems and maintain operations from another location after a disaster.
Protection also includes privacy and ownership.
Data protection also involves privacy and ownership. In situations of uncertainty, organizations need to ensure that their information is not monetized, tracked or exposed, and that assets such as intellectual property, financial records and confidential information remain under their control.
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