Pomerania burned down

Countless servers and data were destroyed by fire in a French data center. But companies do not have to be at the mercy of such an event. On the contrary, a strategic cloud migration can be secured with disaster recovery and backup services in such a way that there is no threat of business interruption.

At the Strasbourg site of cloud provider OVHcloud, one of the four data centers completely burned down on March 10 of this year. 12,000 servers were completely destroyed, along with data from numerous companies and organizations. The cause of the fire has not yet been determined.

What is clear, however, is that companies themselves must also do something to be prepared for such disasters as well as minor disruptions. In the best case, a company is able to immediately restore the last status of its databases, applications and systems so that its business-critical processes continue to run.

Data responsibility

The wheel cannot be turned back in IT history either. Because with cloud services and cloud technologies, specialist departments can solve tasks much more efficiently, develop new business models or automate processes.

The trend is moving towards networked architectures, such as multi-cloud, which consists of combining multiple public cloud offerings from Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services or other local providers. Alternatively, in-house IT uses both public cloud services and services from its local data center, which characterizes a hybrid cloud.

However, every company that moves workloads to the cloud should be aware of its own responsibility for data security. This is not the sole responsibility of the cloud providers. Those who do not book backup services with their provider or do not make their own backups, as has happened in France with many cloud customers, are not fulfilling their responsibility and risk data loss with high consequential costs. It is therefore advisable for companies to approach their cloud migration strategically and implement it using a data fabric concept.

Backup and recovery

A data fabric is both an architecture and a collection of data services. At its heart is data management software that unifies the management of data across all environments, whether multi-, hybrid, private cloud or on-premises.

The requirement for this management software is to incorporate consistent data services so that a company's IT team always has full control and access to the data.

A disaster recovery service is indispensable. This should be selected according to how it simplifies backup, restore and clone management across different applications and infrastructures. Data can then be moved risk-free between local storage and the cloud, and is available across clouds. In addition, entire data centers can be virtually mapped in the cloud.

Cloud migration

Business continuity is a top priority for every company. However, in the event of a fire like the one in the French data center, this must not lead to the conclusion that cloud use should be avoided.

Instead, the task is to secure the company's own cloud activities with a data fabric strategy and an intelligent backup and recovery concept. Specialists are available to support companies in conceptual design and implementation. However, those who remain inactive will lose touch with the competition or risk losing their data.