The Canterbury earthquake recovery operations are driving home to New Zealand businesses that no amount of preparation guarantees the safety of data and applications in the event of a force majeure – the “superior forces” usually exempted from insurance policies. But working in the cloud, at least theoretically, separates your data and applications from your physical infrastructure and places them on a remote platform.

As discussed in previous iStart features, there are multiple definitions for cloud computing. We’ll simplify matters here by giving cloud services the umbrella definition of any model of computing where services and applications are hosted securely and accessed through the internet.

New Zealand organisations weren’t among the respondents to the Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index, but our Australian neighbours emerged as laggards, ranking poorly on their ability to avoid downtime in the event of a serious incident, suggesting we’d have fared little better. However, if stated intentions are anything to go by, the ability to quickly recover IT and systems following a disaster is of growing concern. More than two-thirds (71 per cent) of all businesses surveyed by Acronis expect to include cloud computing as part of their backup and disaster recovery (DR) strategy by the end of the year.

Many onshore providers offer infrastructure as a service (including but not limited to Datacom, Entrada, Gen-i, IBM, ICONZ, OneNet and Revera), and even more of them offer hosting in the cloud, including Appserv, Datacom, Fronde, Fujitisu, Gen-i, IBM, ICONZ, Intergen, Maxnet, OneNet and Revera. Before you even begin to evaluate your provider’s resiliency in the event of the unexpected, you need to ask yourself how quickly you really need to be able to recover your data in the event of a disaster – the answer will have a direct impact on the cost of the service.

Business (almost) as usual
For some Christchurch businesses, having cloud services as part of a DR strategy pre-earthquake meant being able to continue operating uninterrupted, lessening the impact on their earnings. Brett Roberts, a partner in BusinessIQ, knows of at least one such example. “We’ve got two people in Christchurch working out of a small serviced office in the CBD. They haven’t been able to get in there for weeks and they’re still working. They don’t have a server down there; it’s all in the cloud.”

The Christchurch earthquakes shunted businesses around the country to think more carefully about data recovery and backup. CEOs are evaluating risks that are normally obscured by the day-to-day minutiae of running a business. As a result, at least one of our interviewees predicts a boom-time for disaster recovery experts.

It’s worth bearing in mind that a cloud provider’s scale and existing infrastructure can potentially offer resilience of a kind you could never afford to provide yourself. Gen-i’s 12 data centres are co-located in Telecom’s exchange buildings, which were built to withstand natural disasters. Due to the vital contribution telecommunications make to recovering from a civil defence emergency, telcos receive priority assistance at government level.

Neil Osmond, strategy manager, technology, is on the team developing Gen-i’s cloud strategy. He says the emphasis of conversations with customers, particularly since the Christchurch events, isn’t so much on technical features as it is on trust, reliability and availability. He underscores the importance of infrastructure resilience: “Our data centres have seismic bracing and a lot of backup systems, batteries and diesel generators. In a large event like Christchurch, diesel is immediately rationed. Some areas are zoned-off and you can’t get people in. But being a telco, and being part of the civil defence response, we have access to the buildings and diesel, and we’re escorted into the buildings immediately to keep communications for the emergency services open. In thinking about resilience, you’re obviously going to rely on providers who are able to act in extreme circumstances.”

Seismic mindshift
Steve Matheson, chief operating officer of Datacom New Zealand, says the earthquakes highlighted an eventuality people hadn’t fully recognised. “People have always thought that if the power went off, they’d just move their computer somewhere else. This has also rammed home, from a vendor’s perspective, a force majeure situation on a customer.”

Datacom had fortunately invested in strengthening its capabilities prior to the earthquake. Its new Christchurch data centre had been seismically engineered, and even though it’s situated inside what became the red zone, it ran continuously without customer outages. “We had the power go off on us and all the facilities and the bracing on the racks all worked.”

The provider also had a dual fibre link; one half of which was lost during the earthquake when a building it passed through collapsed. Matheson says network resilience proved its worth: “We were still able to access all the systems in Christchurch from Auckland. In fact, we used staff in Auckland to manage the systems for some time during the earthquake.”

Cameron McNaught, executive general manager solutions, Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand, says plans for a New Zealand data centre have firmed up since we last spoke to him in October 2010, when he predicted it would open one this year, subject to customer demand. “We now have internal approval. We’re doing some work with our current facilities to be able to offer services out of Wellington.”

Fujitsu views this as “a starter service”, but it’s also seeing interest from its New Zealand customers in having their data and applications hosted on Australia-based cloud platforms. McNaught says one New Zealand government department is already using a Fujitsu platform for its development test services, as a pilot to evaluate the cloud for larger scale projects. McNaught says he hopes expansion of Fujitsu’s Wellington facility on Taranaki Street will allow it to offer cloud-based services from August or September.

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Cloud resilience at what price?

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