Hurricane Season Is Here: Data Center Disaster Recovery and How the Edge Can Protect Your Network

Data center and collocation demands are stronger than ever, and so is the need for uninterrupted services around the globe. That’s why it’s more important than ever to make sure your company has a data center Disaster Recovery (DR) plan in place for responding to and even recovering from an event out of your control.

Hurricane season, which runs from June 1 through November 30, serves as a good reminder for companies to develop a DR plan that will keep your connectivity running seamlessly, no matter the weather. Hurricanes can pose a serious threat to data centers and IT infrastructure. For 2022, meteorologists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predict an above-average storm season, with 14 to 21 storms and six to 10 of them becoming major hurricanes with the potential to impact the U.S. coastline.

What Other Types of Disaster Recovery Events Should You Plan For?

Aside from hurricanes, there are several other types of disasters to consider in your planning:

• Tornadoes
• Earthquakes
• Fires
• Floods
• Sabotage
• Power outages
• Terrorist attacks/threats
• Equipment breakdowns
• Pandemics
• Human error

Creating a Disaster Recovery (DR) Plan

While natural disasters are out of your control, your connectivity service doesn’t have to be—if you prepare properly. Consider the following steps when developing your DR plan:

• Perform an analysis of your company’s IT infrastructure and critical systems.
• Outline the steps and checklists to follow in the event of a disaster that may impact any of your most critical, draft a document outlining the assets.
• Consider all compliance standards that apply to the main regulatory frameworks, including the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS), the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX).

Why is Disaster Recovery Important?

We realize it’s a longstanding practice to plan for events out of your control, and you may already have procedures in place to withstand power outages, floods, and more. The difference between those events and disaster recovery events is the potential length of time your services might be affected.

The winds of a hurricane or a tornado can be more than 150 mph, which can severely damage or destroy buildings your company depends on to keep business running smoothly.

The Uptime Institute’s 2021 Annual Outage Analysis revealed that 40% of business service interruptions or outages cost between $100,000 and $1 million. The report also revealed that 44% of data center operators surveyed believe that concern about the resiliency of data center buildings has risen in the past 12 months.

“We have the scale to enable a richly interconnected, hub-and-spoke edge-computing model that extends today’s data center multi-cloud ecosystem out to our distributed neutral-host sites, greatly enhancing our probability of success at the edge,” said American Tower President and CEO Tom Bartlett, during a recent earnings call.

American Tower has the solutions you need to grow and manage your edge networks, while protecting against unforeseen disasters. We offer collocation network redundancy and diversity services to deliver more resiliency, with less latency. Edge disaster recovery planning allows you to get your network back up and running quickly, while preserving essential data.

To learn more about our disaster recovery and collocation services, contact our team at datacenters@americantower.com.