ICM launches enhanced hot ship service

Following a trial period ICM has announced that it has launched an enhanced service for IT disaster recovery. For many organisations, particularly SMEs, the ability to recover IT quickly still relies upon the availability of replacement equipment, such as fileservers, disk storage and tape devices, being acquired and delivered to enable the systems to be re-built from back-up tapes. ICM’s new hot ship service significantly reduces the time to replace lost systems by basing pre-configured standby systems at each of its network of 12 regional Business Continuity Centres.

Announcing the service, Mike Osborne, managing director of ICM Business Continuity Services said: “While the big disasters such as terrorism and adverse weather tend to grab the headlines, organisations fall foul of IT failures on an almost daily basis. In fact, ICM is called by one of its customers every 72 hours in respect of a critical IT failure. These total system failures tend to be caused by complex hardware failure, data corruption or network viruses and as such are not covered by traditional insurance. The impact of such a failure can take systems down for more than a day and cost thousands, if not tens of thousands in lost trade and profit.”

ICM’s Hot Ship service is underpinned by an investment of more than half a million pounds on more than 200 pre-configured systems held ‘ready to ship’. In the event of an ICM client suffering a critical IT failure, ICM despatches the pre-configured equipment from the site most local to the client, along with an engineer who will deliver and install the replacement systems. With 76 percent of the UK business population within one hour of an ICM facility, systems will be onsite well within the previous industry norm of four to eight hours following an incident.

In recent trials of the service with existing clients, ICM saw response times of under an hour, from placing the call to equipment arriving on site. In some cases more than 100 miles of travel delays were removed, compared to the traditional industry approach of having a pool of systems based at a central point.

Mike Osborne, concludes: “Whilst the swift despatch and installation of replacement IT systems might not be at the sexy end of business continuity, it remains the most called-upon service and as such is the entry level solution for many organisations trying to implement affordable yet effective continuity. This new hot ship service will save vital hours in the early stages of recovering lost systems and, while it doesn’t cost a fortune, it can help save one.”

Prices for Hot Ship start at under £1,000 p.a. and the service covers Intel, IBM, HP and SUN systems and associated storage and peripherals.

http://www.icm-computer.co.uk/

•Date: 12th April 2007 • Region: UK •Type: Article •Topic: Recovery facilities
Rate this article or make a comment - click here