Business Continuity Best Practises
* Consider business continuity with each purchase. Acquiring funding for “just in case” technology purchases is difficult, but production system upgrades often provide the opportunity to purchase with disaster recovery in mind. As you upgrade the network, consider making infrastructure enhancements and diversifying telecommunications networks to mitigate risks.
* For optimal recovery, create a dedicated recovery data center. Data-driven companies like financial institutions, health care providers, and communications service providers, often demand point-of-failure recovery in mere hours. To recover within 24 hours, experts recommend a dedicated recovery data center that mirrors the production environment. Investing in pre-owned networking equipment for a recovery site decreases equipment costs by more than half.
* Sparing provides critical security. Regardless of company size, sparing is a solid strategy for emergency network back-up that is within most budgets. Whether equipment failure stems from routine wear-and-tear or a disaster, having a spare or a “hot spare” dramatically reduces recovery time. Many companies find that sparing with pre-owned equipment is more cost-effective than extended service agreements.
* No idle assets. Equipment purchased to provide business continuity in case of disaster should not sit idle waiting for an emergency. A dedicated back-up site can be used to process non-critical workloads or allocated to development and testing. When a disaster occurs, critical workloads fail-over to the back-up location superseding non-critical activities.