Disaster recovery challenges at new times

   “As for disaster recovery, a real luck means 99% hard work plus 1% luck, but the 1% luck will not come if we don’t work hard enough.”

   With internet infiltrating every aspect of our lives, the world is changing rapidly as we speak. It shortened the distance between places and brought in new types of economy and social environment. A netizen once joked that “a person could survive 7 days without food, 3 days without water, but die quickly without internet.” With people getting increasingly ‘addicted’ to internet, concerns have been raised about information security under such background.

   Since the beginning of 2015, we have witnessed many security incidents that badly influenced corporate reputation and business development. For example, in September in UK, more than a quarter of a million people didn’t receive their paycheck as scheduled due to the crash of HSBC Automated Clearing System, which also resulted in business interruption of numerous enterprises that had business ties with HSBC. Similar accidents happened in China, too. On May 28, CTrip websites and its mobile clients suddenly became inaccessible. Officials confirmed it and claimed it was caused by ‘unknown attacks’. Coincidently, one day before that, the Alipay was shutdown for a period of time due to fiber accident. Two giant internet companies experienced different systematical failures two days in a row. The online security issue has immediately become the most frequently discussed topic in this field. Under these circumstances, a disaster recovery solution that can shield corporations from business interruption has become a must-have in new times.

The Butterfly Effect

   Under informationized environment, the butterfly effect of an accident has been well recognized by the whole industry. But exactly what kind of challenges will internet bring upon the construction of business continuity and professional disaster recovery solution?

   Firstly, internet transforms the disaster recovery industry. Many enterprises provide disaster recovery service for its customers, allowing them to enjoy a disaster recovery solution without investing in building one of their own disaster recovery centers.The service is better while the price is lower.

   Secondly, enterprises have become more than aware the importance of business continuity. More businesses are done online.

   Thirdly, internet financing has much higher requirements for business continuity. As is known by many, Chinese authorities have strict requirements upon the information system in financing industry, like the grading of disasters, the recovery time and what types of financial institutions should build remote disaster recovery centers.

   Since the downtime accidents in May, a remote multi-active system structure has been the focus of attention in the industry. Under the previous “Two places, three centers” structure, it is much more difficult to maintain a disaster recovery center than to build one. In single-active mode, companies need to continuously invest in adding hardware for disaster recovery and perform constant disaster recovery drills to verify availability. Meanwhile, companies tend not to switch to backup server to prevent losing data. In comparison, multi-active mode means running business on multiple data center simultaneously; once one or more data centers fail, other centers will automatically take over business and maintain business continuity.

Scutech Corporation

   Scutech is the only company in China that is capable of producing completely domestic backup products. It is a nationally certified hi-tech enterprise with internationally advanced backup technologies. We are devoted to developing a series of hardware and software for data protection and HA of information systems.

Note: This article is adapted from an article on IT168. The link is as follows: http://software.it168.com/a2016/0225/2492/000002492429.shtml