If a major weather event affected the data center supporting your critical systems, how much of your disaster recovery strategy would still work as planned?
Backups, failover, and recovery plans all depend on physical infrastructure somewhere. At Liberty Center One, we consider where that infrastructure is located to be one part of a broader approach to resilience and disaster recovery services.
How Does Data Center Location Affect Disaster Recovery Risk?
Data center location affects the natural and physical hazards facing the infrastructure a recovery strategy depends on. No location eliminates risk, but intentional site selection can reduce exposure to certain hazards when combined with continuous data protection, geographic redundancy, failover capabilities, and tested recovery procedures.
Key Takeaways
- Disaster recovery services depend on physical infrastructure. Where recovery systems reside can affect the hazards they face.
- Backup and disaster recovery solve different problems. Backups protect data; disaster recovery provides a path for restoring systems and operations.
- Continuous data protection strengthens recovery readiness. It helps keep protected data available when recovery is required.
- Production and recovery environments can share the same risk. Geographic diversity can reduce concentration of risk when combined with redundant infrastructure, connectivity, failover, and testing.
- Infrastructure location should be intentional. Different geographies carry different risks, making location one consideration within a broader recovery strategy.
The Cloud Is Digital. The Infrastructure Behind It Is Not.
Applications may be accessible from almost anywhere, and employees can work remotely without ever seeing the infrastructure supporting their systems. But cloud environments still depend on physical data centers with power, cooling, network connectivity, backup systems, and people keeping them operational.
That physical foundation matters because a natural disaster or infrastructure failure can affect more than the facility itself. It can interrupt power, connectivity, cooling, or other systems required to keep technology available, even when the underlying data remains protected.
Hurricane Sandy demonstrated that risk in 2012. Storm surge flooded data center buildings in Lower Manhattan, and at several facilities, basement-level fuel systems became critical failure points when flooding affected equipment needed to keep emergency generators operating.
The takeaway is not that backup generators or redundant infrastructure are ineffective. It is that the physical environment surrounding critical infrastructure can influence whether those protections remain available when they are needed most.
How Does Geography Affect Data Center Risk?
Different parts of the country face different combinations of natural hazards, which means infrastructure risk can vary significantly by location.
An inland data center, for example, has a different risk profile from infrastructure located along a hurricane-prone coastline. It is not exposed to direct coastal storm surge or direct Atlantic or Gulf hurricane landfall, but that does not make it risk-free. Severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, flooding, winter weather, high winds, and extreme temperatures can still disrupt operations and require careful planning.
Understanding those differences allows infrastructure location to become an intentional part of resilience planning rather than simply a matter of where a facility happens to be located. Geography does not replace redundancy, connectivity, data protection, or disaster recovery, but it can influence the risks those systems are designed to withstand.
Why Should Data Center Location Be Intentional?
At Liberty Center One, this is a consideration we have made in our own infrastructure planning.
Natural-disaster exposure was one of the factors considered in the selection of our Michigan data center location. Rather than treating geography simply as a matter of finding space for servers, location was considered as part of a larger infrastructure strategy.
Today, Liberty Center One operates hardened data centers in Royal Oak, Michigan, and Cincinnati, Ohio and has partnership agreements with 16 other datacenter locations across the United States. Our current data center infrastructure incorporates redundant power, backup generators, diverse fiber entrances, redundant networking, and other high-availability protections.
Our inland locations have a different hazard profile from infrastructure situated along hurricane-prone coastlines which is one layer of a broader resilience strategy.
What’s the Difference Between Backup and Disaster Recovery?
Backup protects copies of your data. Disaster recovery establishes how critical systems, applications, infrastructure, and data will actually be restored after a disruption. Most businesses need both.
Having current backups is essential, but protected data by itself does not guarantee that business operations can resume quickly.
If a critical environment became unavailable tomorrow, the questions would quickly become operational.
Where will the applications run? Is recovery infrastructure available? Is connectivity working? Which systems need to return first? How will failover occur?
Our disaster recovery services combine several of these elements, including continuous data protection, geographic redundancy, failover capability, and a tested recovery plan designed to minimize downtime and data loss.
A backup gives you data to recover.
Disaster recovery gives you a strategy for getting the business systems that use that data running again.
Could Your Production and Recovery Environments Be Exposed to the Same Disaster?
Geographic redundancy is most valuable when production and recovery resources do not share the same critical risks.
If production infrastructure, backups, recovery systems, connectivity, or other critical dependencies are concentrated in the same geographic area, a single regional event can affect more than one layer of the recovery strategy at once.
A Quick Disaster Recovery Risk Check
Ask your team:
- Where are our production systems physically hosted?
- Where are our backups and recovery infrastructure located?
- Could the same regional event affect more than one of those environments?
- Do our recovery resources depend on the same power, network, or connectivity infrastructure?
- When did we last test whether our recovery plan works under those conditions?
If those answers are unclear, there may be concentration-of-risk issues worth evaluating before an outage puts the plan to the test.
That is why evaluating location means more than asking how many miles separate two facilities. Organizations should understand whether production and recovery environments share important dependencies and whether the same event could affect both.
How Fast Should Disaster Recovery Services Restore Your Systems?
There is no single recovery time that is appropriate for every business or every application.
The right target depends on how long a particular workload can remain unavailable before downtime creates unacceptable operational, financial, or client impact.
Two measurements help define those requirements:
Recovery Time Objective (RTO): How long can a system remain unavailable before it needs to be operational again?
Recovery Point Objective (RPO): How much recent data could the business afford to lose?
We use RPO and RTO requirements when helping organizations determine the right recovery strategy. Liberty Center One’s Virtual DR service also includes a five-minute failover promise for supported environments once failover is initiated.
What Backup and Disaster Recovery Protections Should You Expect From a Cloud Provider?
A cloud provider should be able to clearly explain how its infrastructure is kept available, how your data is protected, where protected copies reside, what happens when infrastructure fails, and how disaster recovery is tested.
Ask:
- Where do our production and recovery environments reside?
- How is our data backed up and replicated?
- What RPO and RTO targets can the solution support?
- How does failover work?
- Can disaster recovery be tested without disrupting production?
- Who supports us during an actual recovery event?
Effective disaster recovery services should provide more than another copy of your data. They should give the organization a defined path for restoring the systems and operations the business depends on.
Location matters because those capabilities ultimately depend on infrastructure somewhere.
But resilience comes from how the layers work together, not from any one layer alone.
Can Liberty Center One Support Companies Nationwide?
Liberty Center One provides infrastructure and disaster recovery services to businesses across the United States. Our data center locations in Michigan and Ohio do not limit where we can support clients.
In fact, infrastructure location can be relevant precisely because clients do not have to be located next door to the systems supporting their business.
The more important consideration is whether the facilities, data protection, connectivity, recovery resources, and support processes behind that infrastructure are designed to provide the level of resilience the business requires.
For us, geographic location is one part of that larger infrastructure strategy.
Build Resilience Before You Need Recovery
Data center location is only one part of a strong disaster recovery strategy.
Effective disaster recovery also depends on how data is protected, where recovery resources reside, how quickly critical systems can fail over, and whether the recovery process has been tested before it is needed.
At Liberty Center One, we consider infrastructure location alongside continuous data protection, geographic redundancy, failover capabilities, and recovery planning as part of a broader approach to protecting critical business systems.
Our Michigan and Ohio data center locations are one layer of that strategy. Combined with Liberty Center One’s data protection solutions and disaster recovery services, they help provide businesses with infrastructure designed to support continuity when disruptions occur.
The goal is straightforward: reduce unnecessary risk and give businesses a clearer path to recovery when critical systems become unavailable.
To learn more about Liberty Center One’s disaster recovery services or discuss your organization’s infrastructure and recovery requirements, contact Liberty Center One at 248-582-1600 or visit www.libertycenterone.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. Could the same disaster affect both our production and disaster recovery environments?
A. Yes, if both environments depend on infrastructure within the same geographic risk area or share critical dependencies such as power, connectivity, or facilities. Geographic redundancy can help reduce that concentration of risk, but it should be evaluated alongside network design, failover capabilities, data protection, and recovery testing.
Q. How far apart should production and disaster recovery environments be?
A. There is no universal distance that works for every organization. The more important consideration is whether the environments are sufficiently separated to avoid the same likely failure events and infrastructure dependencies. Business requirements, latency, workload design, regulatory needs, RPO, and RTO should all influence that decision.
Q. Does having backups in another location mean we have geographic redundancy?
A. Not necessarily. Offsite backups protect copies of data, but geographic redundancy for disaster recovery also considers where recovery infrastructure resides, how systems will fail over, whether connectivity remains available, and how quickly applications can resume operation.
Q. How should RPO and RTO affect a disaster recovery strategy?
A. RPO and RTO should help determine how data is protected and how recovery infrastructure is designed. RPO defines how much recent data loss the business can tolerate, while RTO defines how long critical systems can remain unavailable. More demanding objectives generally require more robust replication, recovery infrastructure, failover, and testing.
Q. What should we ask a cloud provider about data center location and disaster recovery?
A. Ask where production and recovery environments are located, whether they share geographic or infrastructure dependencies, how data is replicated, what RPO and RTO targets can be supported, how failover works, and how often recovery procedures are tested. The goal is to understand the complete recovery architecture, not simply where backups are stored.
Q. How often should disaster recovery be tested?
A. Disaster recovery should be tested often enough to verify that systems, data, connectivity, and recovery procedures still work as intended. Testing is especially important after major infrastructure, application, network, or business changes. The appropriate schedule depends on the criticality and complexity of the environment.
Q. How does data center location affect disaster recovery risk?
A. Different locations are exposed to different combinations of natural and infrastructure-related risks. No geography eliminates risk, but intentional site selection can reduce exposure to certain hazards when combined with redundancy, continuous data protection, failover capabilities, and tested recovery procedures.
Q. Can Liberty Center One support disaster recovery environments for businesses nationwide?
A. Yes. Liberty Center One supports businesses throughout the United States from its U.S. data center infrastructure, including facilities in Royal Oak, Michigan, and Cincinnati, Ohio as well as its access to 16 other locations in the U.S. . A client does not need to be located near a Liberty Center One data center to use its infrastructure and disaster recovery services.
About the Author
Jason Huebner is the Managing Director at Liberty Center One.
Liberty Center One brings decades of experience providing secure cloud hosting and datacenter services for businesses. As an IT infrastructure solutions provider, Liberty Center One specializes in data protection, colocation, white-glove cloud migration, and backup and disaster recovery solutions backed by highly skilled professionals ready to support critical business needs. Learn more at https://www.libertycenterone.com/