Why geo-redundancy protects your data
Football without substitutes? Dakar Rally without a spare tire? Scrap the emergency power supply? No. Redundant resources that can immediately jump in and take over in a crisis are vital to staying in the game, in the race – and sometimes alive. It’s no different for data centres.
Redundant components, redundant systems and even geo-redundant facilities are essential to minimise downtime of cloud-based databases and applications – and thus maximise their availability.
The failure of a data centre can have severe consequences for the reputation, operational capability and financial strength of affected companies: after all, many processes across nearly every industry today are data-driven – and the share of cloud applications continues to rise. Losing access to your own data means risking standstill, delivery issues and disappointed customers. In fact, 60% of companies that lose business‑critical data cease operations within six months of the loss.
Why the substitute shouldn’t live next door
Geo‑redundancy for data centres isn’t just about cushioning downtime from planned maintenance and technical faults; it’s about ensuring business continuity and data availability during natural disasters, power outages and other damaging events that affect a broader geographic area.
Consider recent flood disasters and their massive infrastructure damage: the Elbe flood of 2002, the centennial floods of the Elbe and Danube in 2013, the catastrophic flooding in Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia in 2021, the Ahr Valley disaster in 2022, and most recently Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg in June 2024. When entire regions are underwater, it’s of little help if the geo‑redundant data centre is in the neighbouring town and also has to shut down. Likewise, during a power outage the redundant systems should obviously not sit in the same network segment as the affected primary environment.
The conclusion is clear: the physical distance of the geo‑redundant data centre must be large enough to be outside the impacted zone in an emergency.
What the BSI says about distance
The German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), in its “Criteria for the Site Selection of Highly Available and Geo‑Redundant Data Centres”, specifies that geo‑redundant data centres should be at least 200 km apart. Only in very rare individual cases may this distance be reduced after a prior risk analysis with written justification. Even then the distance should under no circumstances be less than 100 km.
What this means for your own IT
What applies to commercial data centres also applies to in‑house data centres and IT systems. They face the same risks in disasters: data loss or data corruption. After cleaning up and repairing physical damage to buildings, grounds and infrastructure, companies are left asking how to proceed. Few organisations have the resources to duplicate their in‑house servers and operate a second remote site for regular data mirroring.
How the ADESTIS Cloud solves the problem
Choosing a cloud provider like ADESTIS means choosing security: the ADESTIS Cloud can of course serve as a backup for internally hosted applications – geo‑redundant if the distance between the company and the ADESTIS data centre is sufficient.
Additionally, for all the reasons outlined above, we at ADESTIS rely on geo‑redundancy for our own data centres. No compromises on distance. All to achieve the highest possible availability and secure business continuity. On this basis our customers can also benefit from advanced business continuity models: Backup as a Service (BaaS) or Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). We’re here for you.
