It is with great sadness that we’ve learnt that OVH Cloud has had a major fire in its Strasbourg campus. OVH’s press release can be found here:
https://www.ovh.ie/news/press/cpl1786.fire-our-strasbourg-site
We are all glad that no staff or firefighters were injured in this incident, however we realise the major impact this will have on staff and customers alike. Many organisations will today be reviewing the impact of such a fire on their business operation, adding to the stress we are all feeling during these unprecedented times.
If we can learn anything from this, it is risk of the campus data centres (most of the major IaaS, PaaS and SaaS providers have built campuses around the world). With a large scale fire such as this one, the fire services insist on all power being shut off to affected areas, in this case it has taken out 5 of OVH’s datacentres. It is very important that organizations:
- Ensure their DR plans cover catastrophic data centre fire
- Understand the campus fire plans – will the fire departments insist the entire campus is isolated?
- Understand their cloud provider’s disaster recovery plans. OVH is one of Europe’s largest providers, so it can happen to any SaaS, PaaS and IaaS services as they all reside in physical data centres.
We wish all staff and customers well during these testing times.
The Gartner Blog Network provides an opportunity for Gartner analysts to test ideas and move research forward. Because the content posted by Gartner analysts on this site does not undergo our standard editorial review, all comments or opinions expressed hereunder are those of the individual contributors and do not represent the views of Gartner, Inc. or its management.