Why You Need a Disaster Recovery Plan

As data platform professionals, our number one responsibility is to make sure that the data we are providing to our customers and users is available to them whenever they need it. The last thing we want to have happen is
for our business to lose a customer because their “highly available” data wasn’t available when needed or, worse yet, a datacenter-related disaster meant their data was lost and never available to them.

These kinds of events can be damaging to our customers, our professional reputation, and potentially to the company itself. Any of us who have been responsible for highly available data during our career cringes whenever we see a headline about a system outage big enough to make national news. Whether it’s a major airline’s reservations system, the U.S. Customs processing system for travelers, or an online retailer experiencing issues, we want to do whatever we can to ensure that our company and our data does not make the news in a negative light.

Thankfully, as the SQL Server ecosystem has expanded and matured through the years, there are many different tools and technologies available to the data professional responsible for protecting SQL Server-based data from disaster, and ensuring it remains available to all customers and users as required. While some HA/DR options within SQL Server are well known and well understood, some are not. It is important that we are aware of all the HA/DR tools in our arsenal so we can do our jobs.

While Googling madly during an outage is certainly one option for learning about SQL Server and HA/DR and what you should have done to prevent the outage you are currently experiencing, it is certainly not the preferred way to learn. I’m excited to provide this webinar that touches on all the HA/DR options available to us in SQL Server, because, as a DBA, I understand that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when your phone rings in the dead of night because of an outage.

Anything I can do to prevent that and save somebody’s sleep one night feels like a victory to me, and I look forward to reviewing all of the options during my webinar on Tuesday, January 12th at 11 a.m. EST. I hope it saves you some time and sleep!