Summer months often bring excitement for—and memories of—light-hearted joys such as long, warm days, outdoor activities with friends and family, and the simple pleasure of ice cream on a hot day. But while the beginning of summer often is filled with light-heartedness, the late-summer months mark the beginning of hurricane season and natural disaster preparedness for your business.
Natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes and severe thunderstorms annually affect close to 160 million people worldwide. Even as most of the country continues to work from home due to COVID-19, businesses still rely on partnerships with their hosting providers to ensure their organizations remain operational and ready to weather any storm mother nature brings without disruption.
At Leaseweb, we know that businesses can’t afford any amount of downtime. Large organizations must be able to keep in contact with other branches, partners and customers from across the globe at all times. Small and medium-sized businesses must be able to access their information while maintenance crews work to restore power to the area. Our customers rely on us to keep their organization functional even in the midst of a natural disaster.
By definition, disaster recovery is “an area of security planning that aims to protect an organization from the effects of significant negative events.” A severe storm is included in the context of the definition, making natural disaster planning critical to ensure business continuity. One of the biggest components for achieving effective disaster recovery is choosing a hosting provider that can support your business if on-premises functions fail due to storm-caused power outages or other catastrophes. Below are a few key benefits Leaseweb offers organizations in the untimely event of a natural disaster.
1. Maintaining Business Continuity
The location of data is one of the first considerations a disaster recovery plan should evaluate. While theoretically a natural disaster can occur anywhere in the world at any time, when your servers are collocated in a remote data center it’s a lot easier to create a fallback scenario for any emergency. With 20 data centers and more than 80,000 servers under management worldwide, Leaseweb has the capability to ensure your company can continue business as usual – even if there is a bad storm in your area.
You can also be assured that a heatwave won’t take out Leaseweb’s hardware. We take precautions to ensure that our hardware does not overheat, such as maintaining data centers with air conditioning that centrally cools the entire facility and prevents temperatures from rising.
2. Securing Business Data During a Disaster
Natural disasters often, unfortunately, correlate with an uptick in crime. As individuals and businesses evacuate for safety and assess any damage that may have occurred, opportunistic thieves often capitalize on the chaos. Some will take the opportunity to see what vulnerabilities they may be able to exploit, accessing what individuals, families or businesses have left behind. If an employee has left hardware that contains sensitive data at the office or in their home, they could be inadvertently putting the organization at risk.
Leaseweb’s data center locations have multiple layers of security to limit access to data, protect against physical attacks, and keep servers safe from intruders. Measures include 24/7 video surveillance, alarms, keycard access and electric fencing.
3. Being a Reliable, Available Partner
We consider ourselves an extension of our customers’ businesses and take every necessary precaution to ensure your company’s data is available around the clock. We guarantee emergency backup services, such as batteries and generators, are available in case of power outages. Moreover, we test these systems regularly to make sure they are fail-proof when your organization needs them most.
Leaseweb has agreements in place with energy suppliers for redundant energy connections that enter the data center from different locations, redundant Internet connections, and an agreement with local authorities for evacuation work to reduce possible damage to any important cables.
The combination of modern businesses relying now more than ever on staying connected during COVID-19 and escalating incidences of severe weather events highlights the need for an effective disaster recovery plan. Partnering with the right hosting provider is critically important to ensure your recovery plan is airtight.
Let us help you weather the storm. See our Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) options here or read about building your own disaster recovery platform here. To assess your IT infrastructure and determine which solution best suits your business needs, drop a line to our Sales Department at sales@leaseweb.com.