Last week’s outage demonstrated the fragility of the internet and left a lot of people asking questions like the following:

How can we make our infrastructure more resilient? How can we ensure we have access to our data even in the event of a catastrophic outage? What if, after the outage, our data was just GONE?

One thing that I recommended to my customers long before Oct 20th is to have a process for locally storing backups of their cloud data.

I’m not making specific hardware recommendations, but you should be able to get an industrial-grade hard drive with RAID that can store a couple of hundred terabytes, maybe even a petabyte or 2 and have it routinely pull down and back up what is on your S3 buckets.

Perhaps dump your relational DB daily or weekly and back that up as well.

If you are really on the ball, run a full DB replica on site so it keeps up to date by the second.

Don’t limit it to just application data; you may want to consider backing up your codebase as well.

Data egress costs are a bit high, but you have to ask yourself, “What is the cost to the business if that data is no longer accessible?”.

If that number would basically bankrupt the company, then those egress costs are likely worth it.

If you need help calculating the ROI on investments like these, I have a workshop for that. Message me if you want to know more.