Cloud Resiliency and Natural Disaster: Hurricanes, Flooding, and the California Wildfires
Natural disasters (particularly hurricanes and wildfires) conjure images of flooded roadways, buildings without power, and homes ablaze against the juxtaposition of night. Depending on the extent of damage, people can either return to work shortly thereafter or engage in lengthy cleanup efforts both physical and digital.
In this post, we will document recent disasters as well as focus on preemptive, cloud-forward steps IT organizations can complete to make getting back to work relatively easy. Relative is the key word there, because with any natural disaster there is a significant amount of effort just to get back to work, so we don’t want to minimize that struggle. That said, how can cloud resiliency and natural disasters resulting from hurricanes and wildfires make for less difficult and more streamlined IT data recovery efforts?
Natural Disasters: Hurricanes and Flooding
Many hurricanes result in flooding, but you don’t need a hurricane for a flood to occur. In nearly 43 percent of all recorded natural disasters flooding occurs. [World Economic Forum, 2016] We all know that servers, or most electronics for that matter, are not waterproof. Once water splashes onto a powered-on logic board and makes contact between two unintended points, the resulting short circuit means you’re hosed (pun intended). To multiply that scenario by 10,000, when your building floods with 3+ feet of water and submerges your server room, you can assume that most of those systems are trashed.
The past two hurricane seasons have been particularly devastating in terms of flooding. In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey dumped some 33 trillions of gallons on the United States—primarily in Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky [Washington Post]. The majority of that water dropped on Houston, which as a result experienced extreme flooding in what is possibly the worst flooding event in recorded history.
Florence and Michael
Fast forward to 2018, not one, but two extremely powerful storms hit the continental US. First was Hurricane Florence. Florence came out of nowhere and stayed a while—camping over North Carolina before shifting south. The slow-moving storm unloaded water over the Carolinas as well as Virginia (Read more...)
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