I’ve been in the data center industry for a long, long time now…too long. One of the largest clients of my career was Comdisco. As principal, I was in charge of the design of a majority of their data centers nationally and internationally. Comdisco was the pioneer in the disaster recovery (DR) industry since the ’80s. While I was the principal in the design of several projects, I also was an alliance partner in their consulting practice. With this said, I was continuously involved with the DR plans and design criteria around supporting these plans.
Recently, I conducted interviews with an enterprise client that discussed the levels of criticality within their applications. Their response to criticality was similar to other enterprise clients and the method to identify critical applications was to create a Tier program — Tier 1-3, with three being the highest and most critical applications (or vice versa). The problem with this antiquated method of categorizing applications into tiers is that what may not be critical to you, may be critical to me. If I am working in an application that goes down, while it may not have a direct effect on the business, it does reduce productivity. As the use of technology increases and the dependence on it is greater, more applications are seen as critical and not secondary. While losing email in the cloud may not have as direct an impact as a financial application, the loss of email breaks down communication.