Data Centers and Technology: The Cloud is Ill-prepared for Disaster

It is human nature to avoid thinking about worst-case scenarios.  If something is working today, why worry about it until tomorrow?  The problem with that mode of operation though is that while we hope for the best and procrastinate in making plans for the worst, bad things can and do happen.  We’ve seen how Japan was devastated by the recent triple punch of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear catastrophe.  The Japanese in that community took many precautions because of their known history of natural disasters, but it wasn’t enough.

Risks, of course, need to be balanced.  It is usually not realistic to avoid all risk simply by moving as far away from it as possible.  But the level of risks and the possible extent of loss or destruction need to be assessed.  For example, building multiple nuclear reactors in an area in Japan with a cyclic history of natural disaster, in retrospect, seems very ill conceived.  But, while we never can totally avoid all dangers, we can assess risks, plan, and make smart decisions about how we can limit dangers and damage.

With that in mind, let’s think about what is happening with cloud computing.  There is currently a run to build out cloud infrastructure as quickly as possible in an effort to save money and bring on efficiencies.  The nature of cloud computing means that we are building huge centralized storage locations for data.  The extent of loss that might occur with the failure of a cloud data center is compounded by the size of the cloud center when compared to a data center serving a single organization.  The number of individuals and companies that could be affected by the loss of a cloud data center could be quite large.  Loss of large amounts of data for an organization could prove devastating.

While large cloud data centers are  more likely to prepare for disaster than smaller single-organization data centers, we’ve seen that it is possible even for well-thought out secondary and tertiary recovery plans to fail in disaster situations.  How many levels of protection are sufficient, especially when destruction or failure may be the result of a malicious attack, possibly even someone working with inside knowledge?

A new survey by Association for Computer Operations Management (AFCOM) gets one to thinking about vulnerabilities in the on-going move to the cloud.  The AFCOM report finds that the move to the cloud is happening at a phenomenal speed.  By 2016, 80-90 percent of all organization’s IT infrastructure will have some component based in the cloud.  Even when not in the cloud, organizations are storing more data.  Data Centers of all types, even non-cloud ones, have grown — 50 percent of all organizations say that they’ve needed to expand the size of their centers.

The report said that there may be hundreds, if not thousands, of data centers that are ill-prepared for disaster.  As many as 15 percent of data centers have no backup and recovery plans for dealing with disasters, and as many as 65 percent have no plan to deal with cyber criminals.