Business continuity planning ensures critical operations can continue during unexpected disruptions. An effective continuity plan is essential for companies utilizing colocated data centres to maintain data and application availability. This article will discuss key considerations and strategies for planning business continuity with colocated facilities.
Benefits of Colocation for Continuity
Colocated data centres provide physical infrastructure, security, power, and network connectivity while allowing organizations to house their servers and IT equipment. This can support business continuity in several ways:
Redundant Infrastructure
Quality colocation providers have redundant power, cooling, and network components to keep systems online during failures. This removes the burden of maintaining backup infrastructure for each customer.
Geographic Diversity
Organizations can choose colocation facilities in different geographic regions to distribute risk. If a local disaster impacts one site, operations can fail over to another location.
Managed Services
Many colocation providers offer add-on services like backups, disaster recovery, cloud connectivity, and managed IT services. This expertise can enhance continuity capabilities.
Cost Efficiencies
The shared colocation model allows organizations to leverage enterprise-class continuity infrastructure at a lower cost than building their data centres.
Key Planning Areas
When developing a business continuity plan with colocated facilities, key areas to address include:
Response Procedures
Document incident response plans and procedures to failover or recover operations during a disruption. Identify roles and responsibilities for executing processes.
IT Resilience
Assess how redundant colocation infrastructures enhance IT system resilience. Determine single points of failure and mitigation strategies.
Data Backup & Recovery
Define backup schedules, retention periods, and recovery point objectives (RPOs). Verify backup systems meet recovery time objectives (RTOs) if primary data centres are disrupted.
Alternative Sites
Validate that alternate colocation sites have sufficient capacity to handle failover workloads. Test connectivity and replication to alternate locations.
Supplier Continuity
Review colocation providers’ business continuity programs. Assess capabilities to support continuous operations during disruptions.
Staff Training
Train staff on executing continuity procedures through periodic exercises and drills. Maintain skills for using alternate sites, backup systems, and managed continuity services.
Data Center Selection & Design
Choosing the right colocation data centres and designing resilient IT architectures can strengthen continuity capabilities:
- Geographic diversity – Select colocation sites in different regions with a low risk of simultaneous disruption. The ideal distance between locations depends on RPO/RTO targets.
- Infrastructure redundancy – Look for colocation providers with redundant power, cooling, and network infrastructure. Evaluate uptime track records.
- Managed services – Consider colocation providers that offer managed backup/recovery, cloud integration, and continuity services to augment in-house capabilities.
- Connectivity – Ensure sufficient WAN bandwidth and redundant connectivity between colocation sites to support traffic during failover.
- Data replication – Architect multi-site IT systems using real-time replication, clustering, and database mirroring to avoid data loss during outages.
- Resource capacity – Size alternate sites to support critical workloads, data, and user count during failover events. Account for possible growth over time.
- Security – Physical and network security should be consistent across sites. Control access to alternate locations to ensure safety.
Testing & Exercises
Rigorously test continuity capabilities:
- Simulations – Conduct tabletop exercises to walk through and respond to various outage scenarios affecting colocation facilities.
- Cutover tests – Perform orderly shutdowns of primary data centres and failover to alternate colocation sites while monitoring for issues.
- Unplanned tests – Test recovery procedures unannounced to evaluate the ability to respond effectively without prior preparation.
- Documentation – Document test results and identify areas for improvement in continuity plans.
- Periodic testing – Schedule and conduct testing throughout the year to keep continuity plans and skills sharp.
Conclusion
Colocated data centres can provide redundant infrastructure, security, connectivity and managed services to support business continuity. However, organizations must invest in thorough planning, resilient IT architecture, testing, and training to keep critical operations running through significant disruptions. Maintaining rigorous continuity programs is essential even when leveraging shared colocation capabilities.