Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

The majority of organisations today are highly dependent on their IT systems and applications to operate their daily businesses. We have come to take for granted that our systems are constantly available and can support our employees wherever they are and whenever they require access. When things don’t run smoothly, system downtime is measured in minutes rather than hours and every moment of unavailability reduces productivity, damages customer relationships and can cost your company dearly.

Business continuity and disaster recovery is about understanding the potential risks associated with the availability of your IT systems and operational infrastructure, whether these be from a terrorist strike, a cyber attack, a fire or flood, a virus or a simple malfunction, and taking steps to reduce and manage these risks.

Any step that an organisation takes to reduce risk is better than none. At the simplest level, you can protect your data through adequate back-up processes and distributing your storage network. You can ensure uninterrupted connectivity through eliminating single points of failure in your network. You can ensure application availability through co-locating or virtualising your applications, or you can put in place provisions in case of losing access to your facility with full disaster recovery provisions.

What Are The Benefits Of Implementing a Business Continuity Solution?
Even the smallest steps that you take to reduce the risk of your systems and applications being unavailable can provide significant payback.

By having adequate business continuity plans in place you can:

• Significantly reduce employee unproductive time through loss of system or application access.
• Reduce business damage caused by loss of data.
• Ensure your operations continue before, during, and after an outage or a disaster.
• Guard against loss of customers through disruption in the service that you can offer them.

What Business Continuity Technology Is Available?
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery can be covered by a whole raft of new technologies using a mixture of hardware and software. All the major software companies have a solution including Microsoft, Novell, VMware and Platespin together with more traditional back-up software such as Syncsort, Symantec etc. There are also more specialised vendors such as Falconstor whose focus is on a full disaster recovery service.

How Can b2Lateral Help With Your Business Continuity Planning?
There are many options available to an organisation looking at business continuity planning from taking simple steps to secure data, through to building resilience into your application servers and networks. b2Lateral has helped many of our clients to access risk and plan for business continuity. Our business continuity team are well versed in all of the options that are available and can help you assess, plan and implement the most appropriate solutions.

As a vendor-independent services organisation, we are ideally placed to present to you the options that are available both in terms of software and hardware, help you work through the viability and benefits of each of these options and then help you through to implementation and configuration of these solutions.

To find out more, request more information on Business Continuity And Disaster Recovery.