Foolproof business continuity execution

How would your business respond in the wake of a fire or a natural disaster or, in the more likely occurrence, of a lengthy electrical outage? Is your business ready to handle the risks of IT failures and still run at full speed? The necessity for a disaster recovery and business continuity plan is well known, but execution can be a different matter. Once you have the plan, there are critical implementation steps that can ensure success:

1) Enhanced local application availability:

You have categorized your applications based on impact to your business operations and determined those that are most critical. Which high-value applications are needed by your employees and customers on a consistent and immediate basis? Which could be unavailable for a day or a week without compromising them? To ensure those crucial applications stay up and running, they need to reside in an infrastructure that will enhance their availability. Whether in the cloud, or through co-located and redundant server infrastructure, these simple steps can immediately increase their availability.

2) Secure the application environment:

Now you need to ensure the security of your applications. What is the level of security where your mission-critical applications reside, both physical and digital? You should have integrated firewall security with unified threat management to guard against all forms of digital attack, and many companies are moving to top-tier data centre providers for the physical security required for mission-critical data and infrastructure.

3) Provide application fault tolerance:

You’ve made the applications available and secure, but if they reside on a single server they can still succumb to failure. Application fault tolerance can be achieved through multiple high-availability solutions like load balancing between servers, high-availability colocation and data replication. The introduction of cloud infrastructure services has now rolled all of this into one simple offering.

4) Make data recovery available:

In the event that something does happen, a recovery plan is still necessary. Although backup is part of any business continuity plan, it can still be surprisingly difficult to recover the data in a timely fashion without sufficient forethought.

Data must be both simple to back up and to recover, and must not be corrupted. Realize that all data is not created equal, and you may need unique back-up strategies. Laptops may hold valuable data and you may need a solution that ensures files are backed up as they change, and your CRM may change on a minute-by-minute basis so you may want daily incremental backups with full failover. Most companies end up needing two or three unique backup and recovery strategies. Primus can provide you with a flexible offering that aligns the value of the data with the cost of recovery.

5) Deploy site redundancy:

Consider geographically redundant environments. While application redundancy can be met by having servers mirrored in the same data center, site redundancy guards against geographically isolated disruptions. Ensuring that your network and server infrastructure is protected at this level will increase your business’ chance of seamlessly transitioning through any disaster.

All of these steps should refer back to the plan and should confirm what degree of risk tolerance your company has and each application can accept. Does the plan account for the loss of a particular application or data set, and for how long? How many hours or days of downtime can be tolerated for each application before your business is significantly impacted?

To ease customers into the execution of their business continuity programs, Primus Business Services provides a host of managed services and works with our customers to develop a customized migration plan to move servers and applications to secure, high-availability environments, including server co-location, dedicated hosting or in to the cloud, at our seven state-of-the-art data centres across Canada.

Congratulations on stepping up and developing a plan for business continuity, and now let Primus Business Services be the right business partner to help you execute the next steps in your plan.




For more information, visit www.primuspbs.ca