Google Touts Disaster Recovery Readiness

In a blog post, Google has announced that Google Apps — the software-as-a-service collaborative productivity suite — is now fully disaster-proof and ready to instantly restore data lost in the event of a catastrophe. Here’s why their braggadocio has some IT pros seeing red.

The Google blog has some really interesting insight into the metrics of disaster recovery effectiveness, and I suggest you give it a read if you’re at all curious. But the takeaway is that the search giant is now replicating e-mail, documents, and anything else across several of their data centers worldwide.

In theory: That means is that it’s virtually impossible, even in the worst case scenario, for your data to vanish — and it’s included in the base cost of a Google Apps deployment, potentially saving enterprises big bucks on costly storage area network (SAN) solutions.

The problem, as some commenters have noted, is that while the data replication means that failover is instant in the case of disaster recovery, but if data is lost due to user error, it can take up to four hours before Google can catch up. Besides, all the data replication in the world can’t help you if you lose Internet connectivity in an emergency.

Disaster recovery potentially makes Google Apps an even more attractive package than it was before. But MSPs probably need to deal with user error more often than they address a data center catastrophe.