Solutions for ensuring availability and business continuity

According to studies in the United States, companies that suffered from a major disaster, 43% failed to recover, and 29% closed in the next two years.

Business Continuity is not a point but a whole process. It refers to activities performed in a company to ensure that critical business functions will be available to employees, clients or partners or anyone who needs access. A wide range of activities should be planned for a Disaster Recovery plan to be well established. In general, the plan can go through the following steps:

Analyze

An analysis that includes identifying critical areas for your business, defining types of likely attacks and response scenarios and agreeing recovery goals in terms of restoration time and assumed data loss

Design

Design that involves defining the operating command structure, identifying and selecting the secondary location and communication architecture and switching between locations, and agreeing the replication methodology and the software applications required for this.

Implementation

Implementation of the defined solution, including the identification, completion or expansion of responsibility areas.

Testing

Testing or simulating recovery and recovery scenarios, including getting compliance according to your initial goals.

Maintenance

Maintenance, involving periodic retesting of the solution (annually or bi-annually), ensuring the permanent functioning of the solution and maintaining compliance with changes in the structure of the business or infrastructure.

In order to have a well-established plan, some aspects need to be considered:

• Risk assessment to which the company is exposed. What are the possible disasters and their likelihood.
• The impact that each of these risks may have if the company is not prepared.
• What are the Single Point of Failure infrastructure, points whose failure would cause a failure of the entire network. It is good to double these points, thus ensuring system redundancy. Redundancy can be at the equipment level (two devices instead of one), at component level (two sources, processors, etc.) or at application level.
• Also, with redundancy, the rapidity of switching from one device to another in the event of a malfunction is important. Most solutions can provide an almost insensitive transition if configured properly, thus ensuring continuity of service.

The existence of a Business Continuity plan can save the company from major losses or in case of an unforeseen event. The cost of implementation can be seen as a minimal cost compared to the losses you can avoid. That's why many companies chose to invest in a rigorous process to ensure business continuity and proactively meet the potential damage to major applications, services and systems.

Making a Business Continuity plan is important with whom you work. Your specialist or specialists doing this project need to know the company's needs in order to find the most appropriate solutions. Good collaboration between the company and the project expert can make a difference between average or very good results. The specific business depends on the whole solution: what are the critical points in the network, what are the functions and services that can not lose their continuity, all these aspects will be different from one company to another, and it is therefore advisable to seek the advice of a specialist trust.