Internet Disaster Prevention 101: How to plan for potential interruptions and emergencies

What happens to the Internet when there's an unexpected solar storm, a deadly hurricane, a tidal wave or even, a terrorist attack? We’re all aware of the aftermath severe weather and other unruly circumstances can have on the Internet, as well as other communications channels. Take Hurricane Sandy, for example — the incident left a large portion of New York City businesses without Internet. For the first time in over 120 years, the New York Stock Exchange was closed for multiple days. Online sites and services were disrupted, resulting in many businesses losing a significant amount of revenue.

The Internet is a dense web of international connectivity — and in response to any possible disruption, it’s built (in most places) with the infrastructure in place to route around catastrophic damage and keep the packets flowing, despite chaos and uncertainty. This doesn’t mean companies shouldn’t have a back-up plan to reinforce online presence, further supporting potential infrastructure damages, substation equipment changes, or data centre issues that can that can potentially put your company’s online services out around the world.

Many businesses take the approach of adhering to a disaster recovery plan that takes effect after a catastrophic situation impacts their infrastructure. But this approach is both cost prohibitive and inflexible. By the time a disaster recovery plan is taken into action, businesses will have lost potential customers, revenue and brand awareness—all as a direct result of days or even weeks without valuable Internet time.

More so now, disaster recovery plans need to be geared towards disaster prevention as opposed to recovery. The good news is that the growing adoption of abundant cloud services means that organisations can look to cloud-based load-balancing solutions such as Managed DNS to support their disaster planning.

As such, consider implementing the following five steps for an effective Internet disaster plan:

1. Develop a data centre strategy
Do you have a data centre strategy in place? How are you deciding what data centre facilities to invest in? First, you need to determine the optimal location by using an Internet Intelligence solution to pinpoint areas with the best user experience. You should also take care that the data centre has a strong disaster plan. If the data centre facility isn’t properly prepared for a potential disaster, you could be risking major outages and loss of revenue.

One accident, a storm, or a power outage may result in all your sites going down. On the web, diversity is an especially important defence for ensuring any company remains online 24/7. Running your website from a single data centre opens you up to all kinds of potential risks. .Access to multiple globally distributed cloud platform means spreading out your business’ data is easier to achieve and manage than ever before.

2. Invest in reliable load balancing
With failover, in the event of an outage on your primary server, you can redirect traffic to a redundant, off-site server. An intelligent load balancer can geographically load balance your traffic and have built-in failover mechanisms in real time. This is done automatically by monitoring the health of your servers and removing any that are down from the pool of available servers so that traffic is diverted.

3. Obtain a DNS Time To Live (TTL)
The longer your website’s TTL, the longer it takes recursive servers to expire cached answers. What this means is that in the event that your primary server has gone down, even if you have redirected your traffic to a working server, recursive servers will still send to the primary server until the initial TTL expires. Keeping a short TTL (as low as 30 seconds) can allow for rapid failover in the event of an emergency where a quick DNS update is needed. However, many service providers to not allow for significantly shortened TTLs, find one that does.

4. Monitor your servers’ health
If you’re not constantly monitoring the health of your servers, how will you know when something is going on? By monitoring, you can set up specific parameters to test. If two out of three checks to a server come back as failures, then that server can be removed and traffic can be balanced among the remaining servers — thus, keeping your website up and customers happy.

5. Have a customer relations plan ready
In case something does happen and your service goes down, ensure that your customer service and marketing teams are ready with approved communications to distribute. If your customer-facing teams don’t know what’s happening, what’s being done to resolve the problem, or even why it happened, there is a high chance that they may end up frustrating your customers even more. It’s critical that you educate your teams on these things and ensure they are prepared in advance of any potential outages.