How to Strengthen IT Resilience Against Natural Disasters

According to Statista, economic losses from natural disasters worldwide totaled about $380 billion in 2023. The same year, the U.S. experienced 28 separate weather or climate disasters, each resulting in at least $1 billion in damages. With climate change, those numbers are likely to go up. The best way to avoid these costs is by strengthening your IT infrastructure so your business can withstand the effects of a natural disaster and recover even in a worst-case scenario.

What Is IT Infrastructure Resilience?

IT infrastructure resilience requires deploying systems that ensure business continuity regardless of the cause. For mid-size enterprises, this is about more than safeguarding data. It’s also about ensuring all critical operations and services are always available—or can be quickly restored. Improving your business’s resilience starts with understanding the specific geographic and infrastructure-related risks you face. 

Risk Assessment: Identifying and Mitigating Vulnerabilities

When it comes to assessing risks, there are two areas of focus: your physical locations and your infrastructure. Physical location analysis involves identifying where your most significant risks lie based on historical data on natural disasters specific to the site. 

Regular audits of your physical and IT infrastructure identify vulnerabilities that can be exploited in a natural disaster. This includes everything from verifying the structural integrity of buildings and the effectiveness of fire suppression systems to ensuring you have redundant network connections and power supplies.

IT Resilience Mitigation Strategies

Armed with your audit, it’s time to implement disaster-resilient solutions throughout your organization. That includes architectural changes or upgrades that strengthen the structures that house your IT infrastructure and data center. It also includes ensuring you have backup power sources like generators and multiple ways to ensure continuous connectivity across your network.

You must also deploy redundant systems that back up critical IT infrastructure components. If one fails, you have a backup ready to minimize disruptions. That extends to four IT areas:

Data redundancy: Replicate your data to disaster recovery servers across geographically diverse locations to prevent data loss. 

System redundancy: Deploy redundant hardware and network connections that automatically take over if you experience a system failure.

Orchestrated recovery: Choose a backup and disaster recovery solution that orchestrates recovery, ensuring your critical systems are back online quickly 

Geographic diversification: Establish hot, warm, and cold sites based on your RTOs and RPOs. Hot sites are fully equipped data centers that can take over operations almost immediately after a disaster. Warm sites are equipped with the required hardware and connectivity but need some time before becoming fully operational. Cold sites are spaces reserved for emergency use without the hardware and configured software to support disaster recovery.

How Arcserve UDP Supports Enhanced IT Infrastructure Resilience

Arcserve UDP offers comprehensive, advanced data protection and recovery with orchestrated recovery that reduces your RTOs and RPOs to minutes. The solution’s cloud-based management console gives you anywhere access and multi-tenant flexibility.  

The solution automates disaster recovery testing, so you can be confident your disaster recovery plan will work as expected when you need it. It protects against data loss and downtime across cloud, local, virtual, hyperconverged, and SaaS-based workloads. 

Arcserve UDP makes it easy to scale hybrid business continuity topologies locally or across long distances with multiple sites, including service and cloud providers. Installation is also easy; with a few clicks, you can create data stores on the disaster recovery point server, add the nodes you want to protect, a storage destination, and a plan. Global deduplication reduces storage requirements and increases replication efficiency—crucial for maintaining offsite backups at warm or cold recovery sites.

To learn more about Arcserve UDP, request a demo.

For expert help with making your IT infrastructure resilient against natural disasters, find an Arcserve Technology Partner.