Business continuity – for when things go south
These days, successful businesses depend on the applications and information delivered by their IT infrastructure – whether that’s CRMs, internal communications, or customer-facing web apps. That’s why in the event of a disaster – it’s important you’ve got your bases covered. We call this ‘business continuity’.
What does business continuity involve?
A great business is a smooth business – even in the face of a disaster scenario. Business continuity is all about the planning, preparation and procedures put in place to ensure this. While it encompasses all departments, the focus is usually on IT services – as they’re often the most vulnerable and crucial parts of a business.
Common parts of business continuity include data backup, hot sites with ready to use workstations, emergency power sources, and detailed disaster recovery plans.
What should you be prepared for?
Some of the incidents that could kick-start a continuity plan are:
• Natural disasters – fires, floods, storms
• Security breach
• Power outage
• Failed server updates
• Failed applications updates.
RPO and RTO
We generally define business continuity planning in terms of two key metrics:
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – this is the farthest point from which your data can be recovered. So if your RPO is one hour, your data is backed up every hour. This means a maximum of one hour’s worth of data can be lost.
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – this is the time it will take to resume normal business operations. An RTO of one hour means that all systems will function normally within one hour.
The high cost of downtime
Downtime can be very costly. Outages can take away the tools your employees need to do their jobs. It can also affect your customers being able to access your website, apps, place orders, and get customer service. Plus, it can really damage your reputation.
Breaking down the dollars
By some estimates, downtime can cost up to $11,000 dollars per minute [1], which can quickly turn into very large sums – with 59% of Fortune 500 companies experiencing an average yearly loss of $2.79 million [2]. For companies that rely on web applications for their revenue (e.g. e-commerce companies), the damage can be especially devastating.
What we offer
You can’t always predict a disaster, but you can be prepared for one. We know that lost productivity, revenue, and a damaged reputation can seriously affect your business. That’s why we offer a range of services that are both cost-effective and reliable. Here’s a rundown of what you’ll benefit from with us:
• Your environment can be completely managed off-site in a Macquarie Cloud Services data centre, or on-site using disaster recovery as a service
• We provide completely outsourced disaster recovery solutions at the hypervisor level
• With one of the lowest downtimes of any service, our solutions can help get your company up and running again faster – with fewer losses
• We provide Multi-Zone availability, which means you’ll never lose access to your applications.
Ready to protect your business?
Just call us on 1800 004 943 or submit an online enquiry. We’re here to help.
References:
[1] Ponemon Institute Study Quantifies Cost of Data Center Downtime. Emerson Network Power. 2011.
[2]Assessing the Financial Impact of Downtime. Business Computing World. 2011
This entry was posted in Hosting and tagged Business continuity, cloud, cloud benefits, hosting,Macquarie Telecom by Alex de Gruiter.