With recent prolonged power outages, it’s a good time to think about disaster recovery and business continuity. Colocation, private cloud hosting and managed services provider ScaleMatrix is showing off what it has been able to do using CA ARCserve to support its own managed data security service.

ScaleMatrix’s marketing director, James Heller, indicated the need for effective disaster recovery, in part because of power outages like the one in southern Texas last year where residents and businesses suffered through a prolonged power outage. Other power outages this year, such as the ones in California and northern Virginia, brought down cloud services, and cloud providers were lucky they weren’t affected by the recent power outages in India.

“Our customers are under pressure to reduce IT spend while complying with regulations that impact the storage and management of data,” Heller said in a prepared statement. “To help them meet these goals, we need to ensure that our services combine data and system high availability with efficiency and cost-effectiveness.”

In addition to ARCserve, ScaleMatrix leverages CA Technologies’ AppLogic, a cloud platform that allows businesses to rapidly launch SaaS applications.

A cloud provider of any type brought down for even a small amount of time could find their downtime to be quite costly — not only in lost revenue, but also in upset customers who may look elsewhere for a more stable environment. Disasters happen all the time, but they can be planned for.

ScaleMatrix claims it protects more than 100TB of customer data across a range of systems. According to the company, disasters are easily managed, with any downtime being reduced to a matter of microseconds for customers with real-time replication and failover to up to a day for customers using basic backup services. For those with potential day-long outages should disaster bring their businesses down, they’d better hope they can deal with that amount of downtime — and more importantly that their customers won’t be affected.