Ready for anything
Last year, media tracking firm Nielsen Australia made big news when it announced that Australian Internet usage had overtaken TV viewing for the first time. I found this absolutely compelling, but not really surprising. At about the same time “Google” became a verb, consumers started using the Internet to learn about products and services more than any other medium.
So with consumers using company websites to learn more about their offerings, completely bypassing the old sales and marketing engines, it strikes me as unusual that so few companies really protect the availability of what is often their primary customer interaction tool. Advanced web hosting features like High Availability, Disaster Recovery, and Intrusion Prevention are still seen as luxury extras to a hosting package. Why would we accept not having these essential services as part of a standard hosting solution?
I think of this as being a little bit like buying a bunch of 30-second advertising slots from a television station, but accepting in advance that 1 in 10 of those 30-second ads will inevitably be blank screens. Can anyone afford to ignore their customers like that? Of course not. So why do companies accept that sort of deal from web hosting providers? Having your web site offline is arguably worse than a blank TV screen. In television advertising, you need to convince viewers that they want your product. In the digital world, the people trying to visit your site are finalising their decision. If you’re not available, they’re likely to find and purchase a competing product.
You don’t have to learn the hard way...
In just one week last July, there were two fires, network problems, a power outage, and application issues that took five major hosting providers offline, some for several days. Affected companies that hadn’t invested in ‘luxury extras’ such as Disaster Recovery Planning were effectively ignoring their customers for the duration. It’s a hard lesson to learn. You can be sure those businesses will be taking Disaster Recovery more seriously in the future.
After seeing these outages I started asking myself why web hosting customers weren’t taking business continuity more seriously. Indeed, after reviewing the Disaster Recovery Plans of other hosting service providers, I realised they typically involved sending backup tapes offsite once a week. This means a lengthy recovery that would take days and the potential to lose up to a week’s worth of data. There were other providers offering tailored DR solutions, but those solutions more than doubled the cost of hosting. It occurred to me that the industry needed a packaged DR solution, which could be applied to many servers in a group to keep the cost down.
To answer this need we’ve developed our Rapid DR product, a sophisticated mix of technical and procedural solutions that involve the hourly replication of storage from Melbourne to Sydney, to a stand-by site in Sydney. In the event that disaster strikes, recovery can take place in fewer than four hours, with a maximum of sixty minutes of lost data. This is an “enterprise-class” Disaster Recovery solution, but with a combination of virtualisation, advanced storage tools, and economies of scale. If you’d like more information on how DTDigital can protect your business and your brand, feel free to contact us.