Even the smallest interruption has the potential for loss, especially for companies relying on continuous operation.
First, discover what you need to sustain to continue business operations. Your plans should begin with determining which business functions are required to work at the most basic level of operations; what your next focus would be and then finally how to restore full functionality to your business.
Next, it is important to consider your customers, vendors and suppliers and what they need to assure them your business is stable and assuring them that fulfillment and deliveries can continue without major interruptions. This may involve a media strategy to find the impact the disaster had, and how capable you are in part to your ongoing efforts in disaster recovery and continuity planning.
Business continuity focuses on the procedures intended to continue to operate immediately once a cataclysm takes place. Continuity focuses on the day-to-day processes of your business. In contrast, disaster recovery is the efforts made towards security protection to your data from disastrous events for later recovery when the environment has been secured.
With data recovery, you depend on secondary locations to store data on a reliable server. This usually means relying on the cloud, which is the top choice now for disaster recovery. The reason for the popularity in part is the low price in comparison to an on-premises server. Additionally the cloud allows for faster access to critical files that have being backed up, no matter where you move.
For continuity, contact your voice carrier to see about emergency call forwarding options or consider VoIP with a fail-over option. This way should the system become unreachable, calls are automatically forwarded to another phone number to continue business as usual.
Here are our current top three recommended solutions to include in your planning for recovery and continuity.
CyberPower UPS
Depending on the model, an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) can offer additional functionality to facilitate proper disaster prevention. Cyber Power offers over a hundred different UPS’ to accommodate companies with different needs. Some of their UPS’ have hot-swappable batteries for seamless replacement while others have alarms directly configurable through the UPS’ software. Cyber Power’s most robust UPS’ have over ten minutes of full load battery runtime and even provide warranties up to 300,000 dollars.
Intronis Data Cloud Backup
By 2018, Gartner believes virtualized servers will increase in usage to 82 percent, about 30 percent higher than today’s. That virtual servers have such widespread adoption mandates regular off-site backup. Intronis collects, encrypts, replicates, and transmits data storage off-site, automating and scaling the data backed up to the cloud. They find their data centers on opposite coasts of the United States and support popular technologies such as Microsoft Server products and VMware images.
Cradlepoint Cellular Fail-over
During server failure, an automatic server fail-over solution transfers service with minimal interruption. By duplicating the data, secondary servers are ready to receive control in the event that the primary server fails.
Last year Amazon Web Service had a recorded 56 outages. The total downtime reached 2 hours and 30 minutes. With cellular fail-over, a wired connection that fails and cannot be reestablished transfers service to devices that restore the connection wirelessly, allowing engineers to repair the wired connection while service continues.
Michael Durante spent his teenage years into his early 20s climbing the ladder in a branch of a successful banking firm, starting as a teller and ending as a Sr. Branch Manager within 6 years. In 2003, he left the banking world to join his father and create TIE National, a telecom company 60 years in the making. Together, they grew the company from a two-man operation solely working on telephones to a multi-million dollar international business with employees in over a dozen states, covering everything from phone systems to cloud products and computer systems. You can find Michael on LinkedIn.