Location, location, location… famously repeated three times to add emphasis when it comes to property and it’s no different when it comes to data centres. But why is location so important?
A provider that offers data centres in more than one location, with a shared platform, can make it simple to failover, migrate, or serve workloads from different data centres depending on the use case.
If your data centres are not geographically separated by more than a few miles you are taking a big risk and an even bigger risk if you only have one data centre. Geographic diversity is extremely important. Let’s say a civil disruption happens close to your data centre - this could be very serious if you have a business that is solely dependent on it.
The ideal situation is to have multiple data centres that are separated by a considerable distance. For example, Intercity Technology’s data centres are located in Bolton (Greater Manchester) and Elstree (Hertfordshire) which are roughly 200 miles apart and as a result extremely unlikely to go down at the same time.
If you’re running a service that is part of the critical public infrastructure, moving that service to the cloud is fine, but make sure that the cloud provider has a business continuity and disaster recovery plan that basically says that when a data centre goes down, there’s another one to back it up quickly and seamlessly.
A disaster recovery plan is critical, it’s no good simply thinking “I hope it doesn’t happen to me”, “I’ve got one but it’s not very good” or worse, “It’ll never happen to me”. It doesn’t matter how good you are, your data centre can go bang at any moment. Everything that can break, will break, so you need to know in advance what to do when something does.
Where your data is held is another big consideration. There are certain industries where data can be allowed to be held outside of the UK and certain industries where it definitely can’t. Typically, cloud services can be quickly and easily administered without any thought about what happens in the background and the location of the service delivery platform. How can you get peace of mind? You need to ensure that you have a level of transparency with your service provider so you know where your data is, how it is protected and that compliance is going to be achieved as a result.
Where you can find out more
You can find out more about how we have helped our customers to move their IT infrastructure from premises-based equipment to the cloud by clicking here or by getting in touch with our team of experts here
