With the recent flooding in the Southern Region of the US from the spring storms, companies had to implement their disaster recovery practices for their data. There were several companies who lost their data due to flooding within their companies and server rooms. How could this crisis have been averted? Colocation and remote backup.

Colocation is when you work with an outside data center to backup your data offsite at an outside data center. Ideally, this data center will be more than 100 miles away from your current location so that any natural disaster doesn’t affect your backup storage center. Ideally, if your data is stored in two locations (or sometimes three), the risk of data loss lessens.

If you are looking at possible places for data backup and colocation, IT departments have many questions to ask. According to TechTarget, here are “Two Key Disaster Recovery Colocation Questions to Ask.”

1. What should I look for?
   1. Accessibility and resource stability of the colocation provider
   2. Ample security measures
   3. Escalation process within the data center
2. How close should a colocation provider be to my main data center?
   1. This really depends on the disaster scenarios you want to overcome
   2. Workload performance requirements and staff travel logistics
   3. Possible network bottlenecks, switching configuration issues and ISP traffic levels for latency concerns

The key to remember, according to the TechTarget article, is that your data center provider should be a business partner. Someone who is just as vested as you are in the uptime and security of your data, and its storage.

Vaultas has four data centers in Minnesota and Wisconsin. With locations in Alexandria, MN, St. Cloud, MN, Minneapolis, MN and Milwaukee, WI they are the perfect place to house your data and protect it from natural disasters. We know that there are disasters that affect Minnesota and Wisconsin, but with four separate locations between the two states, you can be certain that your data is safe.

If there was a natural disaster that occurred in these areas, you can rest assured that your IT team can visit Vaultas to check on their security measures, or to work from their locations Hot Work Sites if your business has a major outage.

To speak with someone to further understand if the Vaultas data centers are right for you, please contact us today!