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A power failure at a primary New Jersey data center knocked several state agencies offline Thursday afternoon. The cause of failure had not been identified but raises important questions about the city’s data recovery and business continuity planning.
A power failure at a primary New Jersey data center knocked several state agencies offline Thursday afternoon. The cause of failure had not been identified but raises important questions about the city’s data recovery and business continuity planning.
State Agencies Knocked Offline
As of today, some government websites still remained offline. New Jersey’s Department of Labor reported that its website had indeed crashed, interrupting business as usual for office officials.
A spokesperson for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie stated the outage occurred at 2pm and shut down much of the state’s data network including the Treasury Department.
IT staff from the State Office were able to restore connectivity to some websites by 8pm yesterday. The fact that public officials did not disclose what caused the outage raises important questions: do local governments have a business continuity plan in place? More importantly, does New Jersey have a backup data center?
The Importance of Backup & Recovery
Outages at Data Centers do happen from time to time yet proper planning can help restore connectivity to key websites sooner rather than later. Last year, a Seattle Data Center went down due to a bus bar failure. Much like the New Jersey outage, website services could have been restored faster if a business continuity plan was in place. Chances are state IT departments already have one, but they should work on it.
Business continuity assess what is needed to keep things up and running in case an outage occurs. In some instances, traffic can be re-routed towards a remote data center. Same goes for data backup: data can be transferred to a remote server located at another facility. Do state agencies have access to backup data centers? If not, they should seriously consider investing in one. Doing so might prevent prolonged outages from happening again and ensuring normal business operations can commence. Dealing with a state agency is frustrating enough. Is a backup plan too much to ask for New Jersey?
NJ #outage forces Gov websites offline. Do state agencies have a #backup plan? bit.ly/14eqlfN
– Colocation America (@ColocationUSA) January 25, 2013
