What is Geo-Replication, and Why is it Important?

What would you do if your data center failed and you no longer had access to all of your business data? Though you may not want to think about, it is important to plan for unexpected events, especially when it comes to vital business data that you need in order to run your business successfully on a day-to-day basis.

Geo-replication plays an important role in disaster recovery, or how you respond to unexpected events that impact your business data. Below, we’ll cover what geo-replication is and why it’s important for your business so that you can better understand how to protect your company from unplanned events.

What is Geo-Replication?

Geo-replication is a type of data storage replication. With geo-replication, the same business data is stored on servers in multiple locations. This helps provide redundancy, or a back-up, in case your data center fails or something unexpected happens that compromises the way that your data center functions. On a wide area network, or WAN, geo-replication can also help improve network performance as data is stored across geographically-distributed data networks, allowing users in different locations to access the same data at local-area network (LAN) speeds.

With geo-replication, when you create or update data in the primary storage location, your data is asynchronously copied to a secondary location. This makes it so that the data exists in two locations, allowing you to have back-up data that you can access should something happen to the primary data storage location. These two locations are completely independent of one another, meaning that an unplanned incident impacting one data storage location will not affect the data stored in the second location.

Why Geo-Replication is Important for Businesses

When something unexpected happens, how do you react? Though many successful business owners are skilled at staying calm in challenging situations and adapting well to change, it’s hard to deny that a little preparation can go a long way when responding to unplanned incidents. A disaster recovery plan helps you do just that by providing a documented and structured approach to responding to unexpected events. When it comes to your data, geo-replication is an important part of this disaster recovery. It allows you to store data in two separate locations, giving you access to this data even if one data storage location fails.

Geo-replication is especially important as modern businesses are moving from internal to external data storage. Many business owners are migrating to public and private cloud storage platforms where their data is no longer located on internal servers. In order to address these companies data recovery concerns, many cloud providers like Windows Azure are offering geo-replication in some of their data-storage packages. This helps give businesses the peace of mind in knowing that their data is protected should something unexpected happen to initial storage site.

Protecting Your Business

If you don’t have a dedicated IT department, it can be difficult to ensure that your company’s needs are met when it comes to data storage and backup protection. Universal ComOne Louisiana offers network and computer services for businesses that don’t have a dedicated IT specialist in-house. Call us today for a consultation to find out what you could be doing better: (337) 205-9364.