| Top New Year's resolutions for disaster proofing your enterprise Evergreen Assurance offers six business continuity tips that businesses should heed in 2004.
As a result, an increasing number of businesses are beginning to understand the vulnerabilities inherent in their systems and processes and are preparing business continuity plans that will allow them to better cope with the crippling effects that disasters pose to IT systems and the vast amounts of data stored in applications. Helping companies brace for what lies ahead in 2004, Evergreen Assurance has developed a recommended disaster prevention strategy that organisations should implement to protect their business-critical systems. "Businesses have invested in traditional disaster recovery plans for years," said Mike Mulholland, vice chairman of Evergreen Assurance. "Disaster prevention, however, is an emerging model that turns traditional reactionary DR plans on their head. By proactively preventing disasters before they paralyze a business, companies can save time and money and maintain a business-as-usual environment regardless of the nature of the crisis." Evergreen Assurance has outlined the following six tips that businesses should consider for 2004: 1. Redefine disaster - for businesses today, a disaster is any event that blocks access to corporate data and applications. Look for solutions that help businesses recover from all types of IT downtime. Take the end-user perspective and minimise both planned and unplanned downtime for the company. Up to 90 percent of a company's downtime is planned, so invest in a secondary system that keeps the end-user connected to applications and data and minimises disruptions. 2. Prioritise applications - every company has specific applications that are mission critical to keeping the business up and running. Typical candidates for most businesses include e-mail and ERP systems. By prioritising your applications, you can allocate your IT budget appropriately and protect what is most important to your company instead of spreading that budget across non-critical applications. 3. Web-enable applications - whenever possible, Web-enable mission critical applications so employees can access them anywhere, anytime. In the event of a disaster that prevents staff from entering the office, Web-enabled applications allow your employees, customers and partners to stay connected. 4. Move data 100 miles from primary site - in preparation for regional disasters, keep your data at least 100 miles from your primary site. You should also replicate your data continuously to maintain complete data integrity. 5. Automate the recovery process - whenever possible, automate disaster recovery processes to reduce bottlenecks and human error. By streamlining the process, you can reduce business costs by decreasing downtime and allowing faster recovery from unavoidable disaster-related outages. 6. Retain control - by bringing your disaster recovery process in-house, you can monitor, manage and failover your own system whenever any problem arises. This ensures faster recovery, better results, increased ROI and less dependency on shared resources provided by traditional DR vendors.
•Date:
7th January 2004 •Region: N.America / World•Type:
Article •Topic:
IT continuity |
