Gmail went down for about an hour recently creating an uproar throughout social media. The outage even spawned a new hashtag, #googledown. It was more than just an inconvenience. Businesses were complaining that the service disruption hobbled their entire operation. One business owner tweeted: “Gmail is down. Yikes, my personal mail and my whole company, unplugged. C’mon Google hurry up and fix this please.”
While cloud services are convenient, accessible from virtually anywhere and available most of the time, outages can hit even with the largest and best service provider, so it’s important to have alternate/backup services.
If your business relies on one service to operate, what backup or redundancy do you have set up? Here are some things to think about:
Domain and DNS
Make sure you have full control over your domain(s) registration and are using highly available/redundant DNS servers.
This is key for switching your services (website, email, etc.) to another provider. Keeping a low TTL (time to live) of 30 minutes to one hour on your DNS records will allow you to switch to alternate service providers much quicker during emergency situations. Don’t lower the TTL too much, however, because a higher TTL can help with caching and improving website performance. A secondary DNS service is a great way to provide redundancy in the event your primary DNS goes down.
Website
Have a current backup of your website accessible so that you can set up your website with a different hosting provider during an emergency and update your DNS records to have your website traffic directed to the alternate hosting provider.
You can also subscribe to a service like Cloudflare (www.cloudflare.com), which will provide network redundancy for your website and a cache copy of your website when your hosting provider goes offline.
Keep a copy of your emails locally on your workstation by using regular archiving via IMAP or via POP by leaving a copy of your emails on the server. This will give you access to recent emails during an outage.
To keep receiving emails, have an alternate email service with a different provider and switch your DNS records to this alternate email provider during an extended outage at your primary email provider.
If you’re using Gmail for your business, you should consider having your own domain name with an email account.
You can always just use Gmail as your backup. See “Avoiding the ugly email: five steps to a simple business brand and communications makeover” (biv.com).
Cloud storage
Regularly keep a copy of your files and data locally or with another cloud service provider. This will give you access to your files and data during an extended service outage with your primary cloud service provider.
Internet connectivity
Have a primary and a backup Internet connection in your office in case there is an extended outage on your primary Internet connection.
For near seamless and automatic shift to the secondary Internet connection during an outage, implement and configure a firewall that can handle dual Internet connectivity and automatic “failover” (shift to backup system).
Manual failover on the firewall is another option with a less sophisticated firewall but would require manual intervention to swap the Internet connections and/or firewall configuration.
Office power backup
Implement a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) around the office for the servers, phone system, printers and workstations.
This will come in handy when there is an extended power outage. Identify the critical equipment in your office and buy the appropriate size of UPS on the amount of runtime needed during a power failure. •
