What We Do

Business Continuity and DR

This used to be the realm of the top end of town but every company needs to be prepared for disasters: either natural (as we helped customers during QLD floods) or man made (internal issues, external security breaches).

The advent of cloud computing and mechanisms such as moveable and elastic workloads in the cloud or on-prem , disk capacity increases, higher bandwidths, SAN, backup as a service and more, have made the idea of BC and DR more tangible to SMBs and other enterprises that always thought it was too expensive.

Every critical application in the enterprise has to be part of a business continuity plan because companies depend on the availability of those applications to reliably support business transactions. Business continuity plans must encompasses the planning, preparatory and related activities which will ensure that an organisation’s critical business functions will either continue to operate despite serious incidents or disasters that might otherwise have interrupted them, or will be recovered to an operational state within a reasonably short period.

The best practices approach to business continuity requires that three critical areas be addressed:

  • Resilience: critical business functions and the supporting infrastructure are designed and engineered in such a way that they are materially unaffected by most disruptions, for example through the use of redundancy and spare capacity (think: Amazon EC2 instances);
  • Recovery: arrangements are made to recover or restore critical and less critical business functions that fail for some reason (think: Backup as a Service or on premise solutions).
  • Contingency: the organisation establishes a generalized capability and readiness to cope effectively with whatever major incidents and disasters occur, including those that were not, and perhaps could not, have been foreseen. Contingency preparations constitute a last-resort response if resilience and recovery arrangements should prove inadequate in practice (think: temporary office with remote access in case of a natural disaster)

At Network Now, we have been providing end to end solutions in business continuity for over a decade, offering consulting services to develop business continuity plans and the project methodologies needed to put those plans into operation.