ISO 27001 | SSAE 18 SOC 2 Certified Sales: 317.275.0021 NOC: 317.275.0001
Choosing a disaster recovery center – geographic diversity
So you finally have budget approval for your IT disaster recovery project. How do you choose a disaster recovery center?
SearchDataCenter’s Russell Olsen published an article on geographic diversity that sheds light on the question “how far is far enough” when it comes to your disaster recovery colocation or data center.
Choosing a data recovery site is difficult because there are no clear standards in this area. The closest we get to a standard is a white paper released by the Federal Reserve in response to Sept. 11.
Early versions of this white paper discussed minimum distances of approximately 200 miles, but were sharply criticized for being technically impossible for some systems due to latency and the replication demands. The paper settled on “an appropriate level of geographic diversity between primary and backup sites for back-office operations and data centers.” That’s not a lot of help for those of us who have been tasked with this responsibility.