In an increasingly uncertain and dangerous era, broadcasters are looking to the cloud to bolster their disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities, writes David Davies…
Disaster Recovery: Costs have ‘dropped considerably’
Things might be moving quickly in the DR/BC space now, but it’s certainly been a long time coming, as Craig Bury, CTO of media consultancy Three Media, can attest.
“When I first started trying to do more DR work around 1998, everybody had their own data centres,” he recalled. “To build a DR or even BC facility was expensive and nobody wanted to do it, really. Now with so many services in the cloud and more people moving there every day, the ability to implement BC is actually very straightforward. [For example] if you look at the use of automation tools like Kubernetes, Rancher, Docker and Swarm – in combination with something like Terraform [open-source software] – it’s possible to provide almost purely automated recovery, and not only in the area where you are located [thanks to multiple availability zones].” As a result of which, the costs of deployment have “come down by multiple orders of magnitude,” observed Bury.
If it’s undoubtedly become easier – and cheaper – to implement effective BC/DR due to recent advances, another question still remains: Why now?
Last word to Bury, who remarked that the new approach to DR and the rise of hybrid & distributed working can be seen as “two sides of the same coin, requiring a lot of the same skills. One of the great things the cloud gives you is the opportunity to review the way you work on a day-to-basis, and the resilience and redundancy that you need. If you are carrying the World Cup, then you need total resilience, but it may be different with other channels. With the cloud you have the chance to think about that very carefully and then tailor your operations accordingly.”
This article first appeared online with IBC 365 – click here to read the article in full.