“It could be a couple of inches of snow in the case of Ireland,” said Francis O’Haire, director for technology and strategy with Data Solutions. Like numerous others in the business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) space, O’Haire is seeing a greater awareness that while “ensuring the availability of backend systems and data” is important for businesses, just as crucial is the knowledge that “those systems are of no use if they cannot be accessed in the event of a disaster”.
O’Haire told TechPro, “We are seeing more companies make use of a combination of virtual desktops and unified communications to ensure employees have access to all of the applications and collaboration tools they need to get their job done no matter where they are. If bad weather, a transport strike or even a zombie apocalypse keeps key employees at home, business can carry on.”
Needs and expectations
Looking back through the past year, David Kinsella, CTO with Datapac said that he’s found that customer needs and expectations around uptime and availability have changed “dramatically”. Top of the agenda, he said, are discussions which take place around recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs), before a particular approach is taken. “We are finding that the mix of both public and private cloud provides the right balance when it comes to cost, availability and recoverability for Irish businesses,” said Kinsella.
Qualcom technical director, Mark Carragher said that the impact of cloud “has made great progress” in the BCDR market as it allows Irish businesses to test recovery plans in the cloud without any impact to the production systems. “Businesses,” he said, “are using products that leverage various cloud platforms to implement disaster recovery and provide business continuity through remote access to systems. This helps reduce cost as the model becomes an OpEX compared to traditional CapEX for hardware and hosting.”
Planned for the worst
Vincent Naughton, operations manager with Ward Solutions made the point that clever businesses are those who have “planned for the worst”, those who have estimated the possible losses which could occur in the event of a physical, digital or any other type of disaster.
“It’s estimated that up to 30% of businesses that were forced to close for up to a week or longer in the event of an unplanned outage had to close their doors forever,” claimed Naughton. “The information security manager and the business must understand the basic processes required to recover operations from unplanned outages and data breaches, and it is the role of incident management to both minimise the possibility of occurrence and lessen their impact,” he added.
Within the makeup of any worthwhile approach to BCDR is “management support”, Naughton commented. “[Management] must be convinced of its necessity and a business case must be made to attain this support,” he added, recommending a business impact assessment to help stakeholders understand what impact an incident would have on the business.
Long gone
Taking a look at the BCDR market over the previous 12 months, Tadhg Cashman of Logicalis Ireland said that “the day of core infrastructure and applications being commissioned and configured without a dedicated DR strategy is long gone”. The director of infrastructure consulting explained that companies are typically moving to “multi-site service deployment models, and most projects now contain DR implementation and testing phases”.
“DR is now a mandatory requirement, not a nice to have — there has been too many real disasters experienced which have caused serious outages and significantly impacted the financial situation of many companies,” he added.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers