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Executive Technology Summary - SMB Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Ensuring that key systems and applications driving your business are protected against outages is just as critical in the SMB space, if not more so, than for large enterprises. The Underwriting Guide for Insurers by A.M. Best found that only 6 percent of mid-sized companies that suffer catastrophic data loss survive – 43 percent never reopen, and 51 percent close within two years of the disaster. Developing, maintaining, and testing technology and business strategies designed to avoid or minimize the impact of business process interruptions are a key component of SMB IT and Business strategy.
Approach - Business Continuity Planning
IT Evolution utilizes a two-phased approach to design and implement an ongoing Business Continuity program. The approach focuses on the discovery of requirements and the strategy and tactics necessary to develop, implement and maintain the recovery plan.
Executive Technology Summary - Virtualization
A virtual infrastructure facilitates the full utilization of the physical resources of multiple servers across the infrastructure as a single unit, breaking the “one to one” relationship between applications and hardware. The virtual hosting model enables sharing the resources of a single physical computer across multiple virtual servers for maximum efficiency and reliability.
Executive Technology Summary - Storage Area Networks (SAN)
A storage area network (SAN) attaches shared high performance disks to servers in such a way that the storage appears as directly attached to the server while actually contained in the shared SAN infrastructure. Storage is allocated to applications on an as-needed basis, dramatically increasing the rate of utilization by eliminating large amounts of unused disk space. The SAN model also enables storage space to be added dynamically, based on demand, without interruption to operations. All SAN components can be implemented with redundancy, eliminating numerous single points of failure inherent in the older model of tethering storage devices directly to the server they support. SAN configurations offer numerous operational advantages over siloed (direct server connect) storage models, including improved reliability, performance, and manageability.
Executive Technology Summary - Data Replication
Data replication is a backup in real time that duplicates all data and selected application images stored on the Production Storage Area Network (SAN) to a remote SAN at the Disaster Recovery site. The availability of a high speed data line between the Production and Disaster Recovery sites ensures that all changes and transactions are synchronized between the two storage devices. This process guarantees that the Disaster Recovery site will be current should a business continuity event trigger a failover to the Disaster Recovery site and infrastructure.
Data Center Risk Analysis
Data Center Risk Analysis Natural Disaster Location and Impact Guidelines
Business Continuity Plan
A BC/DR playbook is a living gameplan that is developed for the business in order to have a planned and organized process for recovering from all possible incidents which have been defined to interfere with ongoing business operations. It is very much like an insurance policy only to be executed in the event of certain defined incidents that would mitigate the risks associated with being unable to perform daily operations.