What's your plan if your software, system, server, database or connectivity suddenly becomes unavailable?
This question was asked recently during a new customer on-boarding at Cloud365. To their credit, the customer did have a business continuity plan and did execute part of that plan around data and services — however it raised questions that we were happily able to answer.
The first question was around redundancy for their application and data. We had application redundancy taken care of via real-time replication of their application front and back-end between our Sydney and Melbourne data centres. This effectively allows customers to run multiple production, or production/staging/test environments, removing dependency on a single location or region.
Then this question from the customer's IT Manager:
What happens if our database is offline and we can't access backups?
Here's where our partnership with HP benefits our customers via a purpose-built platform we call our Backup Robots, located at each data centre facility. Running on new generation Hewlett Packard Enterprise Class Server infrastructure, it's essentially a site-based localised backup platform that automatically executes backups as often as required, replicating data sets to other data centre locations or customer premises.
Most importantly, customers have direct access to their backups.
We utilise this platform to ensure customer data is backed up and reporting directly to our customers so they too have peace of mind that backups have completed successfully and data sets have been transferred to their target location. Some customers use this service to replicate production databases to staging and test environments.
The Backup Robot service is included with our service, free of charge.
Needless to say the customer was pretty happy with the outcome — their business was back online and the same issue could not occur again since their application and databases were now replicated between data centres in real-time, with multiple point-in-time database backups taken throughout each day, including weekends.
We were able to obtain another incremental backup containing the missing customer and transaction data from the weekend which was later applied to the customer's database.
The whole experience certainly raised awareness around application and data integrity — which we take seriously and have the tools and systems in place to enable for all customers.
Does your hosting provider backup your applications and databases as part of your service?
Do you have a plan B if your site is offline — such as real-time failover or Disaster Recovery?
If these questions are a concern or you need help with an application or website, please reach out and we'll talk through some ideas that may suit your situation.
Thanks for reading — may your backups be in place and restore-able.
