Tropical Storm Andrea didn't waste any time kicking off the 2013 hurricane season with June 1st marking the beginning for the Atlantic and Caribbean regions, a time frame that runs through November 30th. (Make your travel plans accordingly.)
From a recent report:
"We continue to foresee a very active 2013 Atlantic hurricane season. The tropical Atlantic remains very warm, and we do not anticipate development of a significant El Niño. Given the above-average forecast, we are calling for an above-average probability of United States and Caribbean major hurricane landfall."
We've all seen the devastating aftermath of severe weather, whether it be from tornadoes, hurricanes or other severe weather related activity like "Snowtober" from nearly two years ago. Now is the right time to evaluate your business continuity plan and not when there is a run on plywood at the local home building store.
The Path of Tropical Storm Andrea
Internet professionals have typically taken the approach of adhering to a disaster recovery plan that takes effect when catastrophic situations impact their production infrastructures. In the past, this was a plan designed to achieve exactly that: recover from the disaster. This historic approach is both cost prohibitive and very inflexible. Now with the continued accelerating adoption rate of ubiquitous cloud services, there are more flexible options available in the managed DNS space than ever before.
More so now, disaster recovery plans are more geared towards disaster prevention as opposed to recovery. An optimal approach would be to design a solution that can actually sidestep the impending disaster altogether.
Advanced DNS Services: The Foundation Of A Disaster Prevention Plan
DNS is often identified as a simple necessity and not as a useful component to flexible disaster prevention solutions. The reality is that the right DNS implementation can be the cornerstone of a powerful, yet cost effective, plan to avert problems. Most infrastructure technicians begin to look at hosted DNS for a number of reasons like DDoS mitigation capabilities or pure speed optimization.
And again, the right DNS provider can deliver this functionality. However, more fundamental capabilities also exist.
Today's advanced DNS services have embedded monitoring and automatic traffic redirection. Whether by manual human intervention or fully automated, any network interruption, hardware failure, or geographic weather catastrophe can be averted. Granted, a proper evaluation needs to be done for both your hosting provider and your current DNS provider.
Simple management and control of your web servers, applications and IPs is essential to maintaining uptime for your brand, organization and customers. Here is an example of one method of that immediate control:
As you can see, "Serve Mode" allows for immediate control for your IPs or servers. Terms such as "Always Serve" or "Do Not Serve" allow for manual control at the IP level. Allowing the operator to make manual changes as to what IP is actually served by DNS. The term "Monitor and Obey" allows for automated control where the application performs monitoring that determines server status as up or down with notification upon any event status change.
Having these simple functions built into the foundation of your business continuity plan allows for complete public internet traffic redirection without hardware reconfiguration, chasing down the ISP for a live voice conversation, and DNS propagation delays.
The most important aspect: this is all done without downtime.
For years, Dyn has lived by the motto that 'Uptime is the Bottom Line'. Having these simple controls at the foundation of your infrastructure is a key component to achieving the uptime and availability that our customers require.