Protecting your business systems is key in a modern network. Understanding how they are linked, and the effects of a failure, is important. This means incorporating backup systems that work at the data and system level. We can test the recovery of these systems offsite, without interruption to your business. Being familiar with the process speeds up the recovery and reduces the risk of failure.

Protecting key infrastructure systems extends beyond data backups and requires the careful design and installation of high availability solutions with resilience to failure. We take a cloud-first approach to many solutions such as hosted phones using VoIP and cloud storage using Microsoft 365 as these are inherently built with business continuity in mind. However, we understand that on-premise solutions may also be critical to your business and a system loss could trigger a disaster through loss of access to your cloud services or failure of a manufacturing process. Your business continuity plan will need to consider how these key assets can be kept running and online and this typically includes the deployment of the following solutions:

• Replica server solutions using Hyper-V and VMware with the ability to quickly maintain failed servers.
• Resilient network solutions that ensure the key network devices will keep running even if a network switch fails plus high availability pairs of firewalls that will maintain the Internet connection even during a firewall failure.
• Uninterruptible Power Supply solutions that will provide a battery backup to key equipment if the power fails.
• Backup Internet Connections that will maintain the essential Internet services even if the organisation’s main connection should fail.

If a disaster strikes having a coordinated plan will reduce the time it takes to get up and running. The plan will define what needs to happen and provide the information to action it. This plan should be reviewed regularly and be put through table-top exercises to review it. For some organisations this may be supported by the full testing of the plan or this may be the testing and simulation of failures and responses for specific systems. The greater adoption of cloud services which are often not tied to traditional office-based resources and provide access to data and processing from any location has changed the way small and medium-sized organisations need to plan. The latter method of testing is replacing the traditional “loss of office” scenario.

The business continuity plan needs to be linked to the organisation’s Information Security Policy as the most common and high-risk threats may now often be linked to security issues and malicious cyber-attacks.