Disaster recovery

Protecting your business from the unexpected

From the recent floods to the Buncefield explosion, the value of making business continuity plans for when the unexpected happens has become clear; firms that plan for the worst case scenario are best placed to survive the disruption and damage, while many of those that don't run the risk of going out of business. Then there are the risks posed by hackers, with the threat of virus infection and denial of service attacks.

The data stored on any organisation's systems is one of their most important assets, with the loss of this data having the most devastating consequences. In spite of this, 50% of UK organisations do not have a business continuity plan in the event of such a disaster, according to the Chartered Management Institute. However, according to the London Chamber of Commerce, just under half of the companies that experience disaster never recover and one out of 500 data centres annually experiences a severe disaster. Some regulations and legislation, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and the Turnbull Report, contain specific laws governing business practices in sectors considered to be of national importance. In areas such as financial services, health, the military, communications or telecommunications, disaster recovery procedures are vital as any interruptions or data loss could have extremely serious ramifications. In the public sector there’s also the additional complication of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.

A properly planned and executed disaster recovery system which is kept up-to-date can protect your business and ensure you are back up and running fast should disaster strike - often without any noticeable interruption to your business. The gold standard is to create a mirrored system in which your information and applications are regularly and automatically backed up and the entire system duplicated and managed from a separate data centre. Offering intelligent call routing, guaranteed call traffic in the event of a disaster and integration of disparate sites into a single virtual contact centre, our Customer Contact solution is a best of class platform for managing your customer communications.  

Planning your network

Planning is the key to all security policies and this applies as much to your networks whether fixed or wireless as to the data they transmit and the connected equipment. We can help plan, design, implement and run your networks to ensure that you have the capacity you need, when it’s needed, and that systems are regularly updated. Depending on your business, it may be necessary to create a separate network to provide an alternative transmission path in case of disaster or even to handle unexpected peaks in traffic. Denial of service attacks are designed to swamp networks with high volumes of traffic and so bring them down - alternative networks provide a degree of protection from this.

Different technologies offer different levels of security - running dedicated links between buildings or site to site Ethernet makes networks less vulnerable. Sophisticated broadband networks carrying all your applications and services can include managed security features such as firewalls, IPSec VPN access, authentication and network monitoring functions. Finally, wireless local area networks must be planned to ensure maximum protection and the data always encrypted.

Solutions for disaster recovery

• Ethernet solutions - Connect sites, customer databases and employees on a local, metropolitan or national Ethernet network, using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to improve network manageability, security and disaster recovery resiliency.
• Security & VPN Gateways - Our LAN solutions portfolio features powerful security and VPN Gateway offerings.
• Customer Contact Solutions - offer intelligent call routing, guaranteed call traffic in the event of a disaster and integration of disparate sites into a single virtual contact centre.
• Managed Security Services - We offer cutting edge Managed Firewall and IPSec VPN (Virtual Private Network) services to deliver robust protection for your network and data.

We can also help with your other needs; to find out more, please contact us.