Confirmed by a recent survey we issued, disaster recovery was revealed as a top reason for moving workloads between clouds – or having a multicloud environment*. In support of this finding, we’d like to broach the topic of disaster recovery again, share how multicloud environments facilitate a disaster recovery strategy (with a free guide to download), and explain why you should be wary of squirrels.
Back in March, we shared reasons for disaster recovery planning and issued a guide on key considerations. In it, we mentioned common disasters like cyber attacks, human error, and weather systems but it seems we overlooked one other significant cause – the furry kind.
It’s hard to believe but squirrels are wreaking havoc on electrical grids all over the world. By gnawing on power cables or electrocution caused by contacting exposed cables – business districts have been brought down by something as seemingly innocent as the common squirrel. You can see it all recorded publicly on a website run by Cyber Squirrel 1.
To date, there have been 1,252 successful squirrel-induced outages publicly noted, with birds and snakes coming in at a distant second and third respectively. Even a Wikipedia page on this topic mentioned 50 recorded power outages caused by squirrels in the U.S. in 2013 between Memorial Day (May 27th) and August 31st.
As surprising as this may be, the point is disasters will catch you by surprise and cause great inconveniences no matter how nutty the instigating factor. And on the topic of disaster recovery, don’t let your business be disrupted or put out of business by the smallest things – especially a squirrel.
As mentioned earlier, disaster recovery was revealed as a top reason for many organizations employing a multicloud (or hybrid) strategy. Aside from the obvious benefit of enabling organizations to be flexible and mitigate the risk of relying one cloud or data center alone, we still wanted to learn more. So, we issued a survey covering topics like why and how others have embraced multicloud and hybrid strategies, the challenges they faced, and any advice they had to share.
What we were able to gather were helpful tips and a better understanding of how organizations were approaching multicloud. Researching cloud services platforms and virtualization solutions can be complex and our report can be a great starting point for those currently exploring.
Download, read, share, or socialize internally in your organization. Our 15-page report can be downloaded here and some key highlights are pulled out below.
*A multicloud environment is being defined here as those utilizing the services of at least two cloud providers.
- Public cloud providers include AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, and are universally accessible to consumers.
- Hybrid cloud scenarios refer to a combination of on-premises plus a public cloud with orchestration between the two. For those who are reluctant to move all workloads to the public cloud or for organization with stringent security/IP mandates, a hybrid environment provides the best of both worlds; the peace of mind of on-premises data centers plus the ability to optimize availability, scale when needed, and save costs in the cloud.
