Business Continuity Solutions

Business Continuity Solutions

business continuity planning process life cycleIf you or your company does not currently spend money on backing up key systems, sending data offsite, planning for disasters etc. than this post isn’t for you. If you are interested in learning about what types of Business Continuity Solutions are best suited to improve your RPO, Recovery Point Objective and your RTO, Recovery Time Objective than read on.

Solutions

Solutions are all about taking and bundling a number of smaller products into one major solution. For example, Business Continuity Appliances combine Data Vaulting, WAN Transport, Encryption, and Virtualization into one solution that works in harmony. The goal is to eliminate all of the individual decisions and components that a client would have to make to run your software and just make it simple.

Business Continuity Solutions are no Different

Business Continuity Solutions are no different. Ongoing Operations goal is to make the following six components work in harmony and simply for the client in a well thought out manner.

Ongoing Operations believes that every Business Continuity Solution needs to include several key in the following order:

  1. People (these are your employees – you will not successfully recover or operate without them)
  2. Process (this is the procedures and methodology you use to develop, train, and test to make sure everyone knows what to do)
  3. Data (without your data – you probably can’t make intelligent decisions and for those companies that are information based – you can’t do anything!)
  4. Systems (your data is probably pretty useless without a bunch of expensive computers to process it)
  5. Connectivity (without connectivity you can’t get to or communicate to any of that quality data)
  6. Disaster Recovery Testing (if you don’t test – you won’t have the muscle memory needed to recover in an event)

How do these map to Disaster Recovery products sold?

Essentially since the beginning of Disaster Recovery there have been people providing solutions to meet these various risk areas. They map as follows:

People – Workspace (either shared or guaranteed) or sometimes trailer. Essentially it is your hot site or alternate location to send your staff.

Process – Business Continuity Plans, Disaster Recovery PlansCrisis Management Plans, Pandemic Plans, Business Impact Analysis (BIA)Risk AssessmentsTable Top Exercises – These are the key components required to adequately develop and train your team.

Data – This is where Data Vaulting, SAN to SAN replication, Disk Backups, and general Replication come in. (We provide the OGO Replicator to solve most of these problems) The general goal is to get as much data offsite as quickly as possible and to make sure you can recover it quickly to meet your RPO, Recovery Point Objectives and your RTO, Recovery Time Objectives.

Systems – The old way of doing this was to sell you physical hardware. This is a ridiculous approach and nobody should do that anymore with Virtual Server technology. The OGO Replicator combines the Data and System solution together for optimal efficiency. You can also buy Rackspace to store your own equipment or use Cloud based recovery solutions.

Connectivity – The key here is really to have your hotsite or recovery location included in your day to day telecom environment. You will need to have enough bandwidth to replicate your data. Here is a handy tool to calculate it. You will also need enough bandwidth for a recovery and you should plan to have as many options as possible to reestablish connectivity if your main solution is down.

To accomplish a full Business Continuity Solution you will need to find a provider that can combine all of these solutions using a standardized methodology and approach. This is pretty tough to accomplish as most companies just focus on one area. Ongoing Operations accomplishes this by owning the process and methodology and slotting a lot of different solutions in for the People, Systems, Data and Connectivity portions. We tend to think we have great options in each area but sometimes you will need something a bit different than our standard offering. If that is the case – don’t worry we can work with non-Ongoing Operations products as well and often do for many of our clients. We just make it all work well together.

Are you looking for ways to improve your RPO?

WANT MORE INFO? Fill out the form on the right of this page to talk to us.