Like life insurance, everyone has difficulty facing up to the prospect of disaster. Most businesses have woken up to the risks to their local infrastructure, we covered it back in October. However do we stop to think about upstream? What about your ISP? How secure is their provision? Would they survive a disaster? Sadly the answer in many cases is ‘not very good’ and ‘no’ to those two questions. Very often companies rely on small relatively new businesses to manage and host their websites and emails and increasingly often this leads to problems.

Help is at hand – today Google has released more information on the technology built into Google Apps underlining how secure and resilient their systems built into Google Apps are. This duplication and redundancy system covers: Google Apps suite, which include Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Video.

The key is Google’s use of a technology called ‘Live and Synchronous Data Replication’ simply put this means each piece of data held is stored in multiple locations. In practice this means that every time you use Google Apps Email, for example, the information is replicated in two geographically distinct data centre, thus if one of the data centre burns down the data is accessed for the second data centre in the blink of an eye. Historically this has been practised by businesses on a smaller scale but the costs of full data replication can run to thousands of pounds per user per month in storage and maintenance bills. By contrast the 25GB of storage included within Google Apps Mail is backed up and replicated for free. In addition the full range of Google Apps Applications including Google Docs and Google Calender are also replicated in realtime for free.

How? The simple answer is Google can. They operate numerous large data centres throughout the world that are handling millions of users. The Google backbone network incorporates huge bandwidth and capacity and therefore it is extremely simple for Google to mirror huge volumes of data across the world instantaneously.

For both small businesses relying on an offline backup system such as tapes and larger companies using a Storage Area Network (SAN), the benefits in time, cost and reliability make the idea of switching to Google Apps a clear choice.

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