Down with downtime

Make your IT and communications more resilient and restorable with Backup and Disaster Recovery Solutions

Technology allows businesses to do more, but that comes with a downside: your business is more reliant on IT and more vulnerable should it fail. Well run businesses have plans for the most common eventualities and at Blue Saffron, planning for all scenarios is a key part of our service. As a result, when problems do arise, processes are in place that protect your data and get your systems up-and-running with little or no downtime.

If your business is experiencing regular outages or feels exposed to risk or failure, Blue Saffron can assess your current level of vulnerability and help shape the right Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans for your particular situation. We begin by assessing your IT systems, then provide recommendations and solutions that offers excellent value. Our Backup & Disaster Recovery solutions are simple, automatic and scalable and are a key part of our managed IT services.

Make protection part of your everyday IT service with Blue Saffron

Applications, systems & data

With increasing integration of applications, it’s important that the end to end system, not just the data, can be restored.

Voice & data networks

It’s essential the technology that connects people – your phone lines, internet and internal networks – are also resilient with plans in place to restore them quickly in the event of an issue.

Key aspects of backup, business continuity and disaster recovery

It is worth defining the key terms used when discussing this area and explaining what each means for your business.

Backup is familiar to all but refers to more than data: if you require high resilience, backup will include applications, systems, networks and telephony – everything you need for comprehensive cloud backup, data backup, and disaster recovery backup is available in the event of disruption or system loss. Achieving total backup can be expensive. So the level needs to be designed around your organisation’s tolerance for downtime and your capacity to manage it.

Business continuity is a term that applies to the organisation as a whole. It’s a goal that is achieved when processes and procedures are in place that enable the organisation to recover from problems with as little disruption of service as possible.

High availability is based on having an IT architecture in which systems are durable and likely to operate without disruption even when components fail; for example, the supply of power from a generator in a hospital should the mains cut off. High availability is focused on ‘uptime or availability’ rather than recovery time.

Resilience is the ability to provide acceptable service in the face of faults, so this might entail designing for the prevention of certain cyber threats or taking special account of growth through the use of monitoring.

Disaster recovery refers to the restoration plan in place that allows networks, phones, data, software etc to be quickly restored in the event of systems going down. Disaster recovery plans are important but have the potential to be expensive. We help you consider what is mission critical, understand the costs involved and create plans that can be implemented at speed should disaster strike.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO): RTO designates the amount of “real time” that can pass before disruption begins to seriously and unacceptably impede the flow of normal business operations. RPO answers the question “Up to what point in time could the Business Process’s recovery proceed tolerably given the volume of data lost during that interval?”

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Relax: your IT won’t let you down

Being prepared and having a robust IT backup and disaster recovery plan in place are essential if your business is to:

Keep trading – disasters can interrupt your business for so long they cause irreparable damage
Reduce the impact of downtime – any downtime has costs as employees are unable to work and you can lose custom
Protect your brand’s reputation – built up over decades, the value of a brand can be trashed by one disaster that could have been anticipated but wasn’t
Plan and budget wisely – investment in prevention is predictable and can be planned and costed for, whereas the loss of trade from a major problem is harder to quantify
Comply with GDPR regulations which now makes it a legal obligation to ensure you keep personal data secure

With high-profile IT failures increasing in size and regularity, there is greater recognition that investment in prevention is better than paying for the cost of failure. Still managers often fail to commit to spending on backup and business recovery until a disaster occurs. By then the damage is done.

Is your IT prepared for unforeseen issues? Contact us today or talk to one of our team on 0844 560 0202.