Departments
Business Technology
Covering Your Assets: Effective Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery Through a Hosted Solution
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| Scott Kinka
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In the last two issues, we defined exactly what a hosted solution is, how it can potentially benefit your business, and lastly, how to compare the costs of hosted services to in-house equipment and expertise. This installment will focus on the inherent Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) benefits of a hosted model.
Before we do that, however, it is necessary to define exactly what these terms mean and how they differ.
Business Continuity has a shorter window; it is a plan for business or process resumption in less severe events — such as carrier outages, power outages or non-emergency weather events. Business Continuity generally provides for an immediate or near-time resumption of business.
Disaster Recovery is the process of re-establishing operations (IT or otherwise) of a business in the event of a disaster. A disaster could be a fire, a terrorist event, a weather emergency or any event that prevents normal resumption of business for a period of time. As such, disaster recovery generally indicates resumption of business over time — a few days or longer.
Before developing Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery plans, business owners and IT managers need to decide what business processes and systems are critical to their normal business activities, and how immediate the resumption of service must be. Does email need to be up in an hour, while a file server may be out for a day as long as its content is safe?
Regardless of the specific plan, it is safe to say that in the wake of terrorist attacks, multiple wars and significant weather emergencies, along with increased governmental compliance scrutiny, businesses are more concerned today than ever before about Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery.
Offsite backups may not be enough
Today, most businesses have a simple DR plan that involves sending backups to an offsite facility or using an online service to backup data. While this plan ensures the business will not lose its data assets, it does not detail exactly how that data will be used in the event that the server on which it was originally located is destroyed. Nor, does it account for how users will continue to communicate with the server, each other, customers and vendors if a location is unreachable.
As defined in the September issue, a hosted solution involves your business utilizing the resources, servers and software of a service provider in the provider's network or data center. These services may be accessed by your business over the Internet or via a private connection, or VPN, to the provider.
By their very nature, hosted solutions are not located at the customer premise but instead are located in a service provider's Network Operation Center (NOC), virtually eliminating any concern that a disaster, or even a simple outage will affect services at the customer location.
A company that utilizes a messaging and collaboration service, like Hosted Exchange, enjoys the benefit of a live offsite backup and knows that its users will still be getting email on their smart phones, PDAs, laptops or home computers in the event of a disaster at its location.
Voice services at risk
While many businesses have some form of DR plan for their data operations, most do have not have fully vetted plans for the continued operation of their voice services in the event of a disaster. Since most phone systems reside at the customer location, an onsite disaster or simple outage effectively disconnects that location from the rest of the world. Customers and vendors calling that location are met, unceremoniously, with a “fast busy” signal.
With hosted phone service, the auto attendant continues to answer inbound calls, voicemails are reached or calls are automatically rerouted to cell phones. If a location is unavailable for a period of time, employees can simply take their phones home or use soft clients to remain productive and available at their extensions without the rest of the world being any the wiser.
In the last issue, we explored the economics of hosted versus onsite solutions, basing the comparison on hard costs. When you consider the soft costs (time, revenue, reputation, etc.) of losing critical services at your site, there is no question that a hosted solution merits strong consideration.
Scott Kinka is the Senior Vice President of Network Services for Evolve IP, a provider of hosted solutions and managed technology that is unifying and simplifying the way businesses communicate. For more information, please visit www.evolveip.net.
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