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How do IT disaster recovery plans for an earthquake disaster differ from preparing for other disaste

What should your DR plan include when planning for an earthquake?

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My IT disaster recovery (DR) plans aren't planned around the causes of disasters and outages, but rather, my DR plans focus on the effects of a disaster. That being said, the effects of an earthquake might include a considerable damage to buildings, potential loss of life, disrupted transportation and the possibility of repeated disruption in the near future due to aftershocks. Assuming that DR planning means IT recovery planning, the preparations for an earthquake necessitate out-of-region resources for recovery purposes.

For companies located in areas subject to earthquakes, they should establish a recovery site sufficiently distant from the primary data center so that the same earthquake cannot affect both buildings. If there is a requirement for synchronous replication in your data center, that would indicate that the recovery site should be within 125 kilometers of the primary site. Companies that fall into this category should consider a tertiary strategy, with the recovery site within 125 kilometers away and a third site farther away, and only able to support asynchronous replication. For companies with these requirements, cloud computing may be a viable alternative.

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This was first published in March 2010

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