Blackout in Spain: another blow to the waterline of system availability

You don't need to be informed, a media consumer, or even a connoisseur of ICT technologies to imagine the tremendous impact on the systems of Spanish organisations of the prolonged, widespread blackout that took place on 28 April from 12.30 a.m. onwards.

It was not just the decline in user productivity, nor even the unavailability of production systems associated with the business. The hardest blow was the realisation of the fragility of our business continuity plans.

We tend to think that a disaster is always geolocated to a particular point, we base our reliance on distance and separation of telecommunications circuits, and we forget that we depend on global suppliers whose fragility defies any strategy based on external supplies.

At Izertis we have been able to gauge the experience of customers from all sectors and the conclusion is clear: only those who operate their production in public cloud environments or those who have a cloud strategy for their disaster recovery service kept production intact.

A continuity strategy based on self-sustaining primary or secondary environments would have helped mitigate damage

It is widely believed that the cessation of telecommunications services for users cushioned the reputational and economic impact on customers. And it is true. In part. Let us not forget a few facts:

• 61% of Spanish e-commerce supplies abroad
• More than 65% of Spanish citizens had data coverage before 9pm

On the other hand, a multitude of systems had a sudden and unorderly switch-off and switch-on. This led to a huge number of incidents and inconsistencies in commercial and operational transactions in the peninsula's business fabric. And what it drags with it: hardware and software failures, support teams working around the clock, user service centres with low satisfaction, etc.

A continuity strategy based on self-sustaining primary or secondary environments would have helped mitigate damage. Have independent power systems in the production centres to support at least failover manoeuvres and without discussion: public cloud in one of the two data centres.

What is certain is that we must take note and learn from this new shock, thinking beyond and updating our business continuity plans. Because the last few years have taught us to think outside the box and to realise that hypotheses can be overcome by reality.

At Izertis we can help from consulting, preparation or adaptation of the business continuity plan, to the technical implementation of actions or the sale of products and services associated with protection. In that sense, we believe that having two data centres in high availability is a mature strategy, with clear operational and local fault tolerance benefits, but not for logical or regional failures. 

The addition of a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) based on a third data centre in the cloud would also cover these borderline cases by means of an isolated and cost-efficient solution. It should be noted that a DRaaS does not replace the existing high availability strategy, but completely decouples the recovery environment in an efficient manner.

We speak the language of business with a deep understanding of technology and this makes us the ideal partner to help our clients address future threats and protect their assets.