Showing posts with label Disaster Recovery Services. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Disaster Recovery Services. Show all posts

Thursday, 7 June 2012

Disaster Recovery Services Ensuring Business Continuity During Critical System Failure

In modern days, computers have emerged as essential equipment for every successful business and the need for disaster recovery services should be anything that becomes a necessity to save precious data. One of the most awful possible incidents for a business is system failure. Regrettably, such an adverse thing can happen with just a little bit of misfortune. Global markets operate 24/7 and customers expect full access to such services at any time. Thus, disaster recovery strategies help to work for those industries that require business continuity support. 

Even a simple server failure would mean losing out hours of access. In such situations, offsite backup can help to restore the system. A more severe system failure would require complete office relocation and may result in the business to be closed for weeks and even months. This downtime would simply be undesirable to crucial revenue loss. All those firms that offer investment banking services, security management and financial support to global clientele would have been wiped out if they had to close down for substantial length of time. The closure of the business could mean losing out millions of dollars every day for lost access, and the financial aid providers could be held responsible for such losses. Clients would require nothing less than effective Business Continuity services that offer 100 percent uptime. There are several companies that employ a multitude of disaster recovery solutions such as backup generators, online connections; however, even these measures may not be adequate enough in the event of a stern adversity. A business continuity plan should account for every debacle scenario. 

Improvements in secured IT services have allowed industries to decentralize their operations, and offer redundancy, which is a valuable aspect of Disaster Recovery Services. Nevertheless, it is difficult and next to impossible to become fully autonomous of head offices that oversee the entire operations. Employees require a workplace to carry out their jobs. Servers require to be housed, and clients need to be attended. Even though financial assistance can be offered online, there has to be a campus or building handling it.

Business Continuity Services have to include a provision to make out for the loss at the main office. In the event of a fire, or bomb threat or any natural disaster can block the access to the office that could shut down operations. Here comes the need for a comprehensive disaster recovery plan that includes an alternate site that can be utilized for business operations in untoward circumstances. Workforce can be directed to new location without any loss of service. Moreover, the patrons will be aware of the changes being made in business activities. The secondary site should be specifically designed to offer business continuity, and should have better disaster recovery facilities than the main site. Secondary sites are usually maintained by a collocation service rather than the business itself, as they provide all the equipment and expertise necessary to offer high level of security. Location should be chosen carefully. It should be ideally located in close proximity to the central office so that it becomes easy to commute to the backup site when if the condition persists. 

Friday, 6 April 2012

Why should you have an effective Business Continuity Plan?

All the businesses need to have a contingency plan in case of some problem with their regular operations. This problem can be anything from a natural disaster to power failure or an accident which may lead to collapse of day to day routine affairs. In the present times, when so much of our work is dependent on IT infrastructure, we should plan for the situations in case this infrastructure breaks down or comes under undue stress. This is exactly the kind of situations for which a business continuity Plan is required. This plan is prepared after an overall review of your entire operations by an expert agency. The experienced personnel who are generally the senior system engineers will evaluate the criticality of various operations and data processes and then prepare an alternative strategy to be adopted in case of their failure. Such a plan is very important for the quick revival and continuity of operations which may otherwise take a lot of time to recover and come back to normal.

Apart from being an operational necessity and a good working practice, a business continuity plan may be also be required for statutory purposes. More and more insurance companies and contractors are demanding that the businesses should have an effective contingency plan in place which takes over in case of any kind of breakdown and hence the continuation of services is maintained. There are many ways to go about preparing this plan. However the best way would be to hire a professionally Managed IT Services NYC company who has experience and expertise to handle such projects. Select a few of such listed companies and you can then ask them to give you a quote of the estimated cost of setting up and managing such a plan. Do look at the experience of the shortlisted companies and if it is possible, you may also review some of their completed assignments to see the level of coverage that they are providing.

Once you have decided on the company to work out the business continuity plan for your organization, you may then focus on the various parameters that are to be included in this plan. This will depend entirely on the nature of your operations. If your company provides web based services such as website designing and management or organic search engine optimization services, then your continuity plan will need to be quite comprehensive. The reason here is that any discontinuity is not going to affect only your operations but also those of your clients who have relied on your services. Thus a holistic review of your entire activities would be very crucial in determining the level of support that you would be requiring. One must follow the safest approach which is both effective and economical as the cost implication of the whole operation is also to be considered. Thus a company should prepare a business continuity plan which covers all their critical areas and is still within their budget.