The Anthropology of Disaster Recovery?

Working with data centres and IT companies like Databarracks, I have spent this year behind the scenes of 'the cloud', researching the practices and discourses of the data centre industry. While data centres are not typical anthropological field-sites like Amazonian rainforest or African villages, by treating them as objects of anthropological inquiry we can learn a lot about our own culture and how we make sense of the world – a process in which data and IT are increasingly central. Approached in this anthropological way, data centres can be seen as cultural artefacts through which we can begin to explore not only the value and importance of data and IT to our society but also the socio-cultural dynamics underlying their value and importance.

My research with Databarracks led me to focus on the omnipresence of 'disaster' within data centre discourse and how fear of a potential digital disaster in the near future seemingly informs and underlies a number of practices within the data centre industry; from routine Disaster Recovery plans to the long-term bunkering of data underground in electromagnetic pulse-proof data centres in case of civilisational catastrophe. The really interesting thing, from an anthropological perspective, is how data loss and IT system failure are increasingly framed in terms of 'disaster' by cloud-based services such as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).

Disaster Recovery – a concept borrowed from the domain of emergency management and originally deployed for societal security and recovery – has been mapped onto practices of data storage and tied to the continuation of IT systems, to the point that the term now primarily refers to the recovery of business critical IT and data. But in what ways does the framework of Disaster Recovery shape our approaches to the security, protection and preservation of data and, perhaps more significantly, shape our understandings of the importance of data and IT for our society?

This is especially important when we consider how the value of 'Big Data' analytics continues to grow. Data has come to be considered not only a necessity for businesses, corporations and governments, but, increasingly, a necessity for cultural – sometimes even civilisational - survival. No longer simply a 'vital asset' for organisations and nations, data is increasingly being thought of as a 'human record'. Similarly, IT uptime does not just play a central part in business continuity plans, but, increasingly, in cultural continuity plans. Consequently, data centres become critical infrastructures for not only supporting our data-based society, but also for backing up and even potentially re-booting digital civilisation, if it should collapse.

And fear of disastrous, civilisational collapse is not only subtly built into a lot of the practices and discourses of the data centre industry but is also manifest in a growing array of cultural phenomena that deal with digital destruction in one way or another; from books and films featuring electromagnetic pulse-induced blackouts, to news reports on cyberattacks like the Aurora Vulnerability, to legislation aiming to harden the computer 'grid' against extreme space weather events such as solar flares. There seems to be a growing anxiety surrounding our increasing societal reliance upon digital technology and the resilience and sustainability of a digital society in general.

While it may seem like a big leap to go from the everyday action of backing up business files to the apocalyptic destruction of digital civilisation, these can in fact be seen as intimately related acts of imagination and illustrate how even our most mundane practices can stem from strange and spectacular places. Anthropology is often thought of as the study of the strange beliefs, practices or artefacts of other peoples, but if we turn the anthropological gaze onto ourselves, we can, in fact, begin to see how strange aspects of our own culture are. It's kind of like when you repeat the same word until it loses meaning, suddenly even the most familiar things begin to seem a bit surreal.

Engaging with data centres, cloud computing companies, industry training programmes and IT security specialists such as Databarracks, I am thus tracing the imaginative interconnections between the data centre industry and the fear of disaster. With the help of Databarracks I have gained a valuable insight into the increasing value and importance of Disaster Recovery and uptime for IT-dependent businesses and I would like to sincerely thank the Databarracks team for assisting my research.

 

A.R.E. Taylor, University of Cambridge