Data Center Handbook, 2nd Edition

37PREPARING DATA CENTERS FOR NATURAL DISASTERS AND PANDEMICS

Hwaiyu Geng¹ and Masatoshi Kajimoto²

¹ Amica Research, Palo Alto, California, United States of America

² ISACA, Tokyo, Japan

37.1 INTRODUCTION

The best way to prevent deadly effect of natural disasters is to anticipate, be educated, and informed [1]. By applying this process data center operators can effectively prepare, prevent, and control an event.

In addition to natural disasters, technological disasters such as system broken down, power outages, natural gas explosions, and man‐made disasters from terror attacks to race riots could be devastating.

In May 2020 amid pandemic COVID‐19, two dams failed in Michigan during a 500‐year flood event where 11,000 people were told to evacuate from their homes. Pandemic COVID‐19 results in a new normal and a pandemic contingency binder must be available.

It is imperative to have a master plan covering business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) to anticipate, prepare, and contain, with minimal mitigation effort. Each crisis calls for the following stages: resolve, resilience, return, reimagination, and reform [2]. The more we learn from past experience to augment BC and DR, the better we will be prepared for preventing the inevitable and less mitigation. BC and DR plan must be prepared with the consideration of localization in the forms of government, democracy or authoritarianism, culture, and discipline differences among the countries.

The goal of this chapter is ...