Weather-related threats to data centers are no longer confined to historically risk-prone areas. As climate change intensifies, businesses face an unprecedented challenge in protecting their digital assets from increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters. Regions previously considered safe now face new challenges: wildfires threatening facilities in temperate zones, unprecedented flooding in urban areas, and extreme winter storms causing massive power grid failures.
Across the globe, data centers face threats their architects never anticipated. Climate change has rewritten the rulebook, turning what was once considered adequate data protection measures into dangerous assumptions. A facility in Minnesota might have excellent cooling systems for summer heat but could be vulnerable to the increasing frequency of polar vortex events.
Organizations that once felt secure in their local weather patterns now face unprecedented challenges. When those patterns change, administrators must address new disaster possibilities they might not have yet invested resources in. These include wildfires, blizzards, or massive power grid failures.
Natural disasters and data loss
You can’t prevent natural disasters, but you can prevent them from causing data loss, ensuring your business continues no matter what happens to the site. Understanding the risks and their impact on your business is the first step to preventing them.
Natural disasters can compromise data integrity in multiple ways:
Physical infrastructure damage
Floods can submerge servers, fires can destroy storage devices, and high winds can damage facility structures. Even minor water damage from broken pipes or roof leaks can render equipment inoperable.
Power and connectivity disruptions
Extended power outages, following severe weather events, can outlast backup generator capacity. Regional infrastructure damage can sever network connections, making cloud backups inaccessible precisely when needed.
Regional impact
Natural disasters often affect entire geographical areas, potentially compromising both primary and backup facilities if they are not properly distributed.
How to protect your business’ data from natural disasters
Businesses and organizations face several types of threats against their data, including human errors, cyber attacks, and natural disasters.
Data loss prevention strategies and data recovery plans can help businesses recover faster after natural disasters as they don’t have to start from scratch since the information they need to operate is safe.
Create and regularly test a disaster recovery plan
A disaster recovery plan is not a one-time implementation; it is an ongoing process of refinement and adaptation. Organizations must treat their recovery plans as living documents, subject to regular scrutiny and improvement.
Conducting quarterly disaster recovery drills is not optional but a critical necessity. These exercises simulate potential disaster scenarios, revealing vulnerabilities in existing systems and exposing potential weak points in recovery strategies. Moreover, each major system change—whether a critical application deployment or a significant infrastructure upgrade—demands a comprehensive review and potential revision of the disaster recovery plan.
Strategic geographic positioning of digital assets
The physical placement of backup infrastructure is a nuanced strategic decision that goes far beyond redundancy. Effective geographic diversity requires a sophisticated approach that considers multiple risk factors.
Server backup locations must be strategically positioned on different power grids to ensure that a localized power failure cannot simultaneously compromise primary and secondary sites. The distance between these sites is crucial—sites must be close enough for efficient data synchronization yet far enough apart to remain unaffected by the same regional disaster.
Organizations can create a resilient infrastructure that maintains operational continuity even under extreme circumstances by mapping potential risks and strategically distributing digital assets.
Robust data storage infrastructure
Infrastructure hardening is about creating multiple layers of protection that can absorb and mitigate potential disruptions. This strategy involves installing advanced surge protection systems that can shield sensitive equipment from electrical fluctuations during power events. This might involve a combination of uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), backup generators, and alternative power sources.
Equally important is maintaining multiple network connectivity options. A single network path represents a potential single point of failure. Organizations can ensure that network disruptions in one path only partially isolate their digital infrastructure by implementing diverse connectivity routes- including cellular, satellite, and multiple terrestrial internet providers. The goal is continuous, uninterrupted operation, regardless of external challenges.
Apply multiple backup strategies
Implementing different backup methods and strategies simultaneously ensures maximum data protection and business continuity. (For more information, you can explore this page) Organizations should identify their specific data protection needs and develop a comprehensive backup plan to apply multiple backup strategies effectively.
The most recommended approach is the 3-2-1 backup rule, which involves maintaining at least three copies of data, storing them on at least two different media types, and keeping one copy offline and offsite. This diversified approach helps organizations protect against various threats, from hardware failures and human errors to natural disasters and cyberattacks.
The implementation of multiple backup strategies works through several complementary methods. Organizations can use full backups (complete copies of all data), incremental backups (copying only changes since the last backup), and differential backups (copying all changes since the previous full backup). These can be combined with image backups for entire system snapshots and copy jobs for specific data sets.
Backups can be distributed across various destinations, including external media, Network-Attached Storage (NAS), Storage Area Networks (SAN), tape drives, and cloud storage. Each medium offers distinct advantages—for instance, cloud storage provides accessibility and scalability, while tape drives offer cost-effective long-term retention and air-gapped security.
Organizations should automate their backup processes to ensure consistency and reduce human error, implement robust security protocols, including encryption for data, and regularly test their backup and recovery processes. Integrating these backup strategies with broader data loss prevention (DLP) measures, including monitoring network traffic, using data discovery tools, and implementing access controls, is crucial. Additionally, organizations should consider adopting a multi-cloud approach, distributing backups across different cloud providers to prevent vendor-specific failures from compromising data availability.
