Business Continuity
Business Continuity
Summary
Ensuring you protect your organisation’s essential functions should the worst happen is vital.
By ensuring alternate processes are in place you can retain acceptable levels of productivity, customer service, and ultimately minimise the impact on your business.
Where to start?
Firstly, it’s vital to address the priorities following any incident. Who would be contacted first? How would staff be notified?
Establishing a well thought out crisis strategy could be the difference between an early resolution to a crisis and a complete breakdown in relations between you and your stakeholders.
To do this you need to examine your organisation, its people, its critical processes and how these are dependent upon considerations such as IT and infrastructure support, internal dependencies and suppliers.
At JMC we have the expertise you need to ensure a return-to-business as quickly as possible, and with a number of established relationships with other specialists, we ensure organisations of all sizes have access to the necessary services such as emergency offices, IT facilities and backup generators.
And, of course, we put our money where our mouth is. With over 400 supported clients we know that making sure we’re as protected as possible, with established business continuity planning means we never let you down. As such, we have the systems in place to be able to access data, emails, phone systems and client support history so that your business doesn’t suffer should we face an emergency.
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Detail
What options are there?
IT business continuity planning needs to address both the hardware and data contained within the system. The following are just some of the technologies to consider:
Resilience
The aim when creating a resilient system is to remove any single point of failure. Technologies such as Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) allow for failed disks, Uninterruptable Power Supplies (UPSs) and alternative power supplies provide power should an outage occur, and multiple Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provide failover should Internet communications fail and build added resilience into your system.
Virtual servers
Physical servers can now host multiple operating systems with each hosted operating system known as a virtual server. As the operating systems are no longer dependant on the hardware they are running on, it becomes very easy to transfer or replicate them from one dissimilar physical host to another.
Thin clients
Thin clients offer great advantages in business continuity planning. For example, if Citrix servers are used at both an office and a branch office and an incident occurs, thin client sessions mean it is easy to redirect the session to the other
Citrix server(s).
Replication
Replication reduces the time it takes to recover a server. If data is replicated to other standby servers you can be up and running again quickly using a recent copy of your data.
Backups
Tapes have traditionally been the most widely used form of backup and for most organisations they are an effective solution. However technology is now available to allow data to be replicated off-site, to another office or to a secure hosting centre. This approach offers significant advantages compared with conventional tape backup methods including the removal of the tape backup window and its operational impact.
Phone Systems
Contemporary phone systems can be completed integrated with your IT network and, in the same way, accessed remotely and replicated to alternative locations for greater resilience.
Reference
Associated Topics
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Tell Me More
If you would like to know more about this topic or about JMC as a whole please feel free to contact us.
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...we achieved a lot more than I’d expected to and more than JMC had been contracted to do – yet another example of JMC going that little bit further.
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