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Gawker, Lifehacker and others surprise with no Business Continuity plan. |
Gawking at Gawker
I am finding it difficult to believe a site so immanently popular as Gawker did not have cloud-based copies of itself as a go-to in the event that something happened to their island-based web servers. It's commendable that Manhattan-based Gawker gives its business to an ISP/web host with hyper-local presence (also in Manhattan). But the Gawker Media CTO should be taken to task for not having the Gawker site replicated to hosting locations far outside of the now partially-flooded Manhattan. What exactly is the Gawker Business Continuity plan? The site has been coming back online in bits and pieces so we can assume that there was at least a Disaster Recovery plan. However, in today's reality of dime-a-dozen cloud service offerings there is no reason a well-funded website should ever have to resort to Disaster Recovery.
Gawking Even More (Gizmodo and Lifehacker)
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Businesses should not rely 100% on island-based data centers. |
Rounding out Gawker Media's recognized websites are Kotaku (video games), Deadspin (sports), Jalopnic (cars) and Jezebel (women's interests). Collectively the websites boast visits by billions of unique visitors. I can't say what the threshold is for needing to expand into mutli-location, failover-ready hosting but it's safe to say that Gawker Media is past that point.
Good Plans Sometimes Fail (That's Why We Test)
If a business continuity plan was in place but failed then it suggests the plan has not been adequately tested and/or maintained. If there was a DR plan but no BC plan then it reveals a surprising lack of foresight. In either case it seems that Sandy has provided what should be a wake-up call to businesses of all sizes whose disaster recovery plans stop short of answering business continuity concerns.
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