| Rapid restoration | |
| “… there is an expectation that businesses are resilient and disruptions are dealt with quickly” |
Work Area Recovery Solutions Gerard Joyce |
| Some Irish organisations have strengthened their businesses by implementing continuity systems and processes but this has not yet become the norm. However from the customer’s perspective there is an expectation that businesses are resilient and disruptions are dealt with quickly. Consider how you might continue to operate if one of your suppliers – telecoms (voice and data), electricity, water – were to fail or were unable to deliver the service you depend on. What if the building you’re in became inaccessible for some reason? Could you continue to operate within a short space of time?Work Area Recovery Solutions (WARS) provides pre-configured workstations (desks, PCs, telephones, chairs) in an office environment with multiple voice and data connections to the Internet and telecommunications networks. Our customers can be up and running within 1-2 hours of invocation. They can divert their customers’ calls into our recovery centre, connect to their data and continue to provide a service. Based on a subscription model, clients pay an annual fee per seat and we will work to make sure that they are ready if disaster strikes. All contracts include test days so clients can test individual elements of their plan, bring some of their staff to the centre and try it out. Our recovery centre is based in Ennis, Co Clare. If disaster recovery is a regulatory requirement or a prudent management decision give us a call. |
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| DR from the cloud | |
| “We have several customers who now use their DR environment as a very effective infrastructure for spinning up test and development environments” |
Savenet Solutions Lorcan Cunningham |
| In our experience, a growing number of Irish organisations are looking to extract more benefit and value from continuity systems but it’s still early days for the majority. For many organisations, DR and business continuity is still being treated as no more than a painful cost to be controlled and the desire to reduce costs has led to some customers getting into serious difficulties when a real crisis has occurred. The companies who are looking to business continuity as another method of actually adding value and strengthening their businesses are usually those us who have engaged with a modern cloud solution, designed to offer additional flexibility and use cases that are not possible with the traditional two-site, dual-infrastructure setup.For example, we have several customers who now use their DR environment as a very effective infrastructure for spinning up test and development environments. This enables them to implement patching and version upgrades to critical systems in a safe environment that’s already there, that they’re already paying for, without any impact on their live environment. Once everything is tested and proven to be working fine in the DR environment, they are able to implement that patch or perform the upgrade into their live environment and off they go, all done without having to build a specific test and development box in-house, or go to the cloud to spin up a server with a public infrastructure provider.In the past 18 months we’ve implemented cloud DR solutions for a number of customers where there is a realisation that a good business continuity plan – incorporating a tested and proven DR solution – does add a great deal of value to their business when it comes to attracting investment or in the case of many B2B organisations; attracting larger customers and meeting the various compliance obligations they face. In this way their supply chain is actively adding value and competitive advantage to their business. Many customers are working to implement ISO processes in their businesses. Here again, we feel that the IT supplier can add great value as a critical part of the customer’s supply chain. Savenet is an ISO 27001 certified business and we also have 10 years’ experience in the highly regulated pharmaceutical manufacturing area, operating under strict quality and change control processes.
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| Service catalogue base | |
| “The key to strengthening BCDR strategy is to create a service catalogue that gets its foundation from interdependencies of its business applications” | 
Arkphire Eoin Johnston |
| The traditional approach to Disaster Recovery is ‘one size fits all, replicate and forget’ approach, underpinned by data replication to the best available secondary location within that organisations’ budget. Often the organisations existing replication technology choice can dictate a DR service that may not match the applications requirements, leaving the organisation with much uncertainty around the amount of time to stand services up effectively in a DR scenario. Many organisations then find themselves in a position where they must opt to resolve the issues at the primary site rather than invoke DR.Big cloud providers take a different approach, architecting applications to be highly available by load balancing across datacentres. The ISVs have taken note, and many applications now come with their own replication technologies such as Microsoft Exchange Database availability groups and Oracle Data Guard.
So what can Irish organisations do to improve their resilience to disaster? Arkphire believe that the key to strengthening BCDR strategy is to create a service catalogue that gets its foundation from interdependencies of its business applications. Arkphire has developed an IT Transformational Process that helps clients move from traditional “build once and apply a single Service Level across the business” to a fully integrated Service Catalogue which utilises a blend of technologies to allow clients to choose the appropriate disaster protection on an application by application basis. This process focuses on risk and cost reduction to deliver the appropriate service levels to the business.
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