The Role of IoT to Disaster Recovery
April 26, 2019There were more than 120,000 modifications of malware involved in IoT attacks in the first half of 2018 according to the Kaspersky Lab IoT report. While it’s clear that IoT vulnerabilities are a major problem, data center disaster recovery can play a big part in keeping that threat minimized.
The reach of IoT across manufacturing, healthcare, communication, energy and other sectors requires companies to develop DR plans that encompass IT systems and IoT where they overlap. This includes planning for application, network and analytics risks from cyber-attacks.
Minimizing IoT vulnerabilities with IT Disaster Recovery Services
A significant amount of IoT sensor data is collected beyond the network edge where it must either transmitted to a central cloud data center or an edge-based data center. Both options can be better protected via disaster recovery planning with an interconnected data center provider.
That’s why data center disaster recovery planning needs to look at both the data protection as well as the resiliency across the internal and external IoT platform to ensure that IoT-enabled business processes can withstand disruptions.
Cloud and colocation data center services providers with a global data center network reach can shoulder the additional load of being disaster recovery service providers. Their very nature enables them to be in the best position to consider cloud services that collect IoT data from medical devices to energy grid data and beyond. These providers can help businesses to develop an IoT disaster recovery plan that includes immediate failover to a secondary system to avoid potentially devastating downtime in such mission critical scenarios.
These managed hosting providers bring significant levels of expertise, speed, and agility to bear in creating formidable disaster recovery plans that protect data from IoT sensor and other sources. But protecting that data as part of data center disaster recovery plan is only half of the equation as IoT will also play a role in furthering IT disaster recovery services.
IoT’s Positive Role in Data Center Disaster Recovery
What many businesses are discovering is that disaster recovery services can benefit from IoT as well as provide protection for IoT data. For example, IoT systems combined with analytics and machine learning can be used to spot serious problems before they happen. This is true in terms of emerging smart cities, the energy grid and all forms of manufacturing.
IT disaster recovery services for businesses and IoT can playing a major role in disaster recovery for manufacturing, community assets and cities as well. Manufacturing and a host of industries are ramping up their use of digital twins within IoT. In short, digital twins represent a live, updated digital version of a physical asset like a complex machine or system.
The use of IoT sensors would provide a secondary benefit through monitoring that could ensure uptime and operational efficiency by providing a heads up that trouble may be coming. IoT sensors embedded in infrastructure can monitor everything from roads, bridges, and transportation to buildings and energy grids in real time.
Working in conjunction with geographically dispersed colocation data centers, structures buildings neighborhoods and entire cities with IoT platforms can bolster disaster recovery in many ways including:
Prioritizing preventive maintenance and repairs
Real-time structure and power gird evaluation, monitoring and failover for adverse weather and power consumption events
Utilizing machine learning with IoT data sets for disaster predictions and recovery planning
The role of colocation data centers for IoT and big data are broad and varied. Today’s leading global data center providers are uniquely poised to help businesses make IoT safer and secure as well as a net positive for and with IT disaster recovery services. That removes many of the roadblocks to realizing a secure and increasingly connected world.