Disaster can strike data centers in a particular location at any time and if your organization relies on the servers in the affected data center, it can cause havoc on your company operations.
The usual advice to starve off the negative effects that a business may institute in case of data center outage is to have a nearby disaster recovery plan, which commonly involves data backup from a data center nearby.
However, some disasters can cause outage in the whole city/state/country, which makes this strategy unproductive when it comes to smooth running of operations.
That’s where the advancements in offsite data centers have opened up possibilities to improve the business continuity process. Knowing the benefits of using offsite servers will come in handy when it’s time to create business storage protocols.
In case of offsite servers, the data for business continuity will be transmitted in one of the following ways:
· Physical transport: It can involve something as simple as copying important files onto a removable hard drive and storing it in another location to backing up entire systems and running those in case of a disaster.
· Remote continuity: This is a more modern method of ensuring the business keeps getting active hosting and backups, where the data and files are transmitted from servers located in an offsite data center.
Benefits of offsite data servers
With an offsite server, all businesses can gain access to their information with FTP or the cloud. This allows the business to recover at any location in case of a disaster. For example, if there is a sandstorm in the United States that forces data centers to shut down in a particular state, a remote server can keep businesses relying on that data center going to diffuse down time.
Details of RedDIT data center in mexico indicate that businesses can take advantage of offsite server locations at an international scale to protect their operations from downtime. For instance, if disaster strikes data centers in the United States, US-based businesses can back up their data from data centers in Mexico and keep their company operations running. This will also ensure professional reputations and brand images remain intact.
Other benefits of offsite data servers include:
Reduction in workload: Conventional server setups require an IT team. Storing back up servers in a nearby location or in-house can take a long time, and may also tie up business resources. Remote servers in far locations can be initiated at a tap of a button in a disaster situation, or can be scheduled for automatic activation in case of an adverse event, even if business personnel are away from the office.
Cost savings: If you rely on numerous servers with large amount of data that is also backed up regularly, physical storage backup and disaster recovery can be costly. Offsite data centers have the option of monthly billing cycles and support almost unlimited backup space. For companies operating in industries where large amount of files need to be backed up, such options will save them money.
Reliability: The major benefit of an offsite server is that the process can be automated. Files can be updated on a daily basis, or a time can be set for the update. Because the solution works over the internet, files can be recovered quickly.
Bottom line: Offsite data servers are vital to most businesses and a solution should be deployed to ensure business continuity in disastrous times.