Business Continuity
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery is one of IT’s most important responsibilities, and to thrive in today’s data-centric environment, companies must renew their focus on disaster recovery and business continuity procedures and policies. Yet surprisingly few IT organizations take the time to construct the policies and infrastructure needed to protect the data they need to survive.
Are the critical functions of your business disaster proof – including your Internet and WAN links?
Business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) isn’t new– not by a long shot. But some of the technologies supporting BC/DR strategies are, in fact, cutting edge. Virtual servers, virtual storage and virtual desktops all play into BC/DR plans. New cloud-based storage and applications offer distinct advantages for BC/DR. Making sure the tools and data your business relies on are accessible in more than one place mitigates the risk of a single point of failure. But none of it matters if you can’t reach your tools and data – wherever it resides. To that end, we ask, “How resilient are your connections to the outside world?”
To ensure that your wide area network isn’t a potential single point of failure, you need:
- Redundancy (multiple WAN links and an extra WAN link controller for hardware failover)
- Diversity of carriers (make sure they don’t use the same copper, fiber optic line or last mile)
- Ecessa unit to manage link load balancing and automatic failover.
As virtualization and cloud adoption move from the early adopters and development-oriented organizations to the more traditional, business continuity becomes more important than ever. A survey by NaviSite, a Time Warner Cable company, revealed one-third of U.S. respondents have already migrated a significant amount (50-70 percent) of their IT infrastructure to the cloud, driven by their desire to improve reliability, uptime and offer improved service levels. Are you ready to capitalize on the cloud?
