Whenever there’s a decent-sized earthquake somewhere in the country, I receive the inevitable flurry of phone calls from prospective customers seeking out the safety of our data centres.

With data centres in Auckland, Hamilton, Christchurch, and Wellington, Datacom has New Zealand covered with the highest-rated facilities on offer to make sure our customers’ mission-critical apps and platforms keep operating when the unexpected strikes.

We have customers who have had to evacuate earthquake-prone buildings at short notice. Because their IT infrastructure was hosted with Datacom, there was no mad panic to shift server equipment and reconfigure networks — it was simply a matter of logging in from a new location.

Between the threat of natural disasters that go hand in hand with living in a seismically active country, and true wildcard events like the COVID-19 pandemic, disaster recovery is at the front of every IT manager’s mind. But the reality is that most IT meltdowns can be prevented with a bit of forethought and planning.

Earthquakes are dramatic, but in actual fact, plain old power failures are the main cause of disruption to IT systems in most countries. At Datacom, our data centres are designed from the ground up to keep operating during disruption to the power grid. That capability alone has won us customers, as investing in, and maintaining, high-quality backup power supplies for on-premise data centres can be prohibitively expensive.

Tied to legacy systems

Every New Zealand business is on its own digital transformation journey, but the country lags behind other parts of the world in migrating from on-premise IT infrastructure to private and public cloud platforms. 

Many businesses are loath to part with the legacy systems that have served them well for years and the on-premise data centres they have invested in building. But the Christchurch earthquakes and COVID-19 have shown us, in very different ways, what can happen when employees are no longer able to physically access the buildings where their operations and infrastructure are based.

Indeed, many New Zealand organisations were spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic into migrating rapidly to managed hosting facilities and public cloud platforms, at least in part. This means they will be better prepared to ensure business continuity when the next shock hits.

Increasingly, that shock is likely to be a cyber attack of some description. On both sides of the Tasman, we are seeing public and private organisations increasingly becoming the subject of denial of service attacks, ransomware campaigns, and hacking efforts to steal sensitive data.

With one of the largest cybersecurity teams in the country, Datacom is well-placed to help our customers navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of cybersecurity threats. But our data centres also come into their own when disaster does strike.

With the highest levels of redundancy, and a team that is always there maintaining the data centre environment, and ready to assist our customers in times of critical need, our data centres are designed to prevent you from ever losing your systems in the first place. 

Our Uptime Institute Management and Operations Stamp of Approval (achieved at all four of our New Zealand data centres), and our industry-leading certification programme (including ISO27001, PCI, and IL3 facility design), speak to how we maintain and run our facilities to prevent downtime. Because we believe prevention is better than recovery.

Any disaster-recovery plan should have a multi-layered approach and, increasingly, we are finding that Datacom’s managed hosting services are part of that approach.

Get in touch to find out how we can help you develop your disaster recovery plan and draw on our data centre resources to prevent the worst from happening.

Andrew Green is the associate director (data centre business) for Datacom. With 15 years’ experience in the data centre industry, Andrew is responsible for all business activity for our network of six data centre sites across New Zealand and Australia.

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