{"id":19377,"date":"2015-12-30T10:56:59","date_gmt":"2015-12-30T10:56:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=19377"},"modified":"2015-12-30T11:04:37","modified_gmt":"2015-12-30T11:04:37","slug":"the-genuine-need-for-disaster-recovery-in-irelandeu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=19377","title":{"rendered":"The Genuine Need for Disaster Recovery In Ireland\/EU"},"content":{"rendered":"

How many times have you watched or read the news, saw some story about an earthquake, hurricane, typhoon, or some other disaster and think \u201cthat will never happen here\u201d? Stop kidding yourself; disasters can happen almost everywhere.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always considered Ireland to be relatively safe. We don\u2019t have (anything you\u2019d notice) earthquakes, typhoons, or tornadoes; our cattle and sheep don\u2019t need flying licenses. Our weather is dominated by the gulf stream<\/a>, keep Ireland temperate. It doesn\u2019t get hot here (we are quite northerly) and our winters consist of cloud, rain, and normally about half a day of snow. We get the tail end of some of those hurricanes that hit the east coast US, but there\u2019s not much left by the time they reach us \u2013 some trees get knocked over, some tiles knocked on our roofs, but it\u2019s not too bad. Even when we look at our neighbours in England, we see how their more extreme climate causes them disasters that we don\u2019t get. Natural disasters just don\u2019t happen here. Or do they?<\/p>\n

The last month or so has revealed that to be a lie. Ireland has been battered by 6 storms in the past month. The latest, Storm Frank, was preceded with warnings that the country was saturated. That means that the ground has absorbed all of the water that it can; any further rainfall will not be absorbed, and it will pool, flow, and flood.<\/p>\n

This morning, I woke to these scenes:<\/p>\n

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Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford [Image source: Paddy Banville<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n

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Graignamanagh, Co. Kilkenny [Image source: Graignamanagh G.A.A<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n

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Middleton, Co. Cork [Image source: Fiona Donnelly<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n

Frank isn\u2019t finished. It\u2019s still blowing outside my office and more rain is sure to fall. There are stories of communities being evacuated to hotels, and the above photos are just the easy ones for the media to access.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t just a case of cows trapped in fields, stick a sandbag on it and you\u2019re sorted, or somewhere far away. This is local. And Ireland is a relatively safe place \u2013 we\u2019re not Oklahoma, a place that some deity has decided should be subject to cat 5 tornadoes every time you\u2019re not looking. Dorothy, the point is, that disasters happen everywhere, including in the EU where we think it safe.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s bring this back to business. Businesses have been put out of action by these floods. Odds are any computers or servers were either on the ground floor or in the basement. Those machines are dead. That means those businesses are dead. They might be lucky enough to have tapes (let\u2019s leave that for another time) stored offsite but how reliable are they and will bare-metal restore work, or will it take forever? How much money will those businesses lose, or more critically, will those businesses survive loss of customers?<\/p>\n

This is exactly why these businesses need a disaster recovery (DR) solution. There are several reasons why they don\u2019t have one now:<\/p>\n