9/11, Cloud Storage and my iPad
On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, 10 years ago, I was working at the time for KPNQwest in Amsterdam whilst this tragedy struck the US. At that time the main product being sold to the emerging dot.coms of the time was collocation space with managed services. Managed Hosting as we know it today was very much in its infancy.
Indeed the technology in the past 10 years has taken major swoops. As a technology and gadget lover myself, I found it particularly sad when on TV I saw a grieving mother who lost her son in his 30’s, whilst he was working in one of the Towers. She said that every time she saw an advert for an iPad she would become tearful as she remembers her son, who had a passion for gadgets and technology and would have loved to have experienced the iPad.
Apart from there not being an iPad ten years ago, the approach to how businesses managed their backup services has also changed. Because of higher disk prices back then, backup on tape was very much common place; businesses with a large enough budget would pay for a copy to be made of the tape and also kept offsite. In the event of a recovery being required, the tapes would have to be located and identified and then with a long process, the data stored on them recovered on the new environment.
Nowadays, businesses with critical data realise that not only has the data recovery process got to be a fast one, but that the process for backing up the data and storing it offsite must be more than manual, as in the days of tape. For example at NetBenefit we deliver a managed backup service that is based on two managed backup environments hosted in two different data centres that are geographically separate. However the process that enables offsite backup is not the case of a tape being made and then delivered by a courier, it is done through a process of mirrored systems that ensure data is consistently being backed up via a secure network to the different data centres. In the unlikely event that one of the data centres should be decimated in a terror attack, the surviving data centre will have copies of the data available for recovery.
Events such as 9/11 and other major disasters, in my opinion have been one of the drivers of Cloud Storage. These events showed that relying on a single data centre makes a business vulnerable and that backing up at multiple locations and having access to that data securely via the Internet can ensure faster continuity in the event of a disaster.
So as I enjoy my iPad today, I will think how lucky I am to be alive and sadly remember those who perished in 9/11 and will never have the opportunity to marvel at this clever gadget.
