There are recent articles, including a paper published in the scientific journal Nature discussing that Neanderthals could regularly start fires using flint. The movie, A Quest for Fire (1981) explores what happens when a tribe lost their fire before the time of the Neanderthals. Heat for warmth, cooking of food, and protection are all critical functions of fire and the existence of the tribe.
So how did those early tribes get fire? They found it from lightning strikes hitting dried grass and forests or stole it from other tribes. Of course, as rare as that event is, it made protecting their fire critical especially during rainy, wet seasons. In the tribe, it was a member’s job to always keep the fire burning. At some point, the tribe would have to split that job among members in order to have several small fires as a backup to continually keep the fire burning.
Multiple fires kept as backups required tribe members to keep those fires and continually feed them. Other members of the tribe gathered fuel for the fires. The more backup fires, the more tribe members were required to maintain those fires, rather than protecting the tribe or hunting/gathering. There were and always are trade-offs! For Neanderthals, it was much easier to keep dried kindling and flint than an actual hot fire. It may take time to get from smoldering kindling to a roaring fire, but that’s a trade-off as well.
You see where I’m going here?
A proactive backup/business continuity strategy for your cloud transformation journey is critical to the existence of your company should a catastrophe occur. Hot/Hot High Availability in the cloud allows for instantaneous failover should primary servers or data stores be lost or unavailable. However, it’s a very expensive strategy that should only be reserved for the most critical of business functions.
Each of your services and dependencies should be analyzed for their criticality to the business. You should ask yourself:
- Can they be down at all?
- Can they be down for a few hours and started from warm servers running elsewhere?
- Can they be down for a few days and restarted from images?
Hot, Warm, and Cold type HA/DR strategies all have their place, whether on-prem, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment. One must have an understanding of the criticality of the services as well as the resources required to keep those strategies in place in order to have an effective plan.
Don’t be like the tribe in A Quest for Fire that must rebuild from scratch. Have a strategy and a plan. We have a team of data center and cloud experts that can help create and implement strategies as well as supply hardware and managed services for your critical systems regardless of whether they are on-prem, in the cloud, or both.
Have questions? Use our contact us form to speak with our team.