On October 4th, Facebook experienced a massive service outage that took over eight hours to resolve. If a technology company as sophisticated as Facebook can experience such an event, then any business can.
While Facebook’s issue was not a disaster recovery (DR) scenario, it forces the hard questions:
- How well are your business processes capable of surviving a disaster scenario?
- Do you have a clear list of Critical vs Non-Critical systems and services?
- Do you know how often your teams test Disaster Recovery Readiness?
- What are those uptime Availability Percentages in minutes, hours and days each year?
Below is a table that shows you how much downtime you should expect given a specific uptime guarantee percentage:
Availability Percentage
Approx. Downtime Per Year
95%
18 days
99%
4 days
99.9%
9 hours
99.99%
1 hour
99.999%
5 minutes
The cloud doesn’t mean you’re safe
Proper disaster recovery planning and testing are critical to ensure your business technology continuity. Even if your application is hosted by one of the major cloud providers, that does not guarantee you are 100% safe from disaster events.
In reality, using services like Microsoft Azure just means your data is deployed on physical machines in Microsoft data warehouses spread across the world. These buildings are just as susceptible to earthquakes or other major events.
