BlueFire > Products > Disaster Recovery > Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity

As if running a business wasn’t already hard enough, an unexpected disaster can be an absolute nightmare.

Power outages, flooding, fire or even a careless driver downing a telephone pole all have the potential to interrupt your daily operations, and the implications can be serious enough that many businesses never recover. Research firm Gartner estimates that two out of five businesses that experience a disaster will go out of business within five years.

Proper disaster recovery (DR) planning can help you beat the odds, but that planning must be done now and continually revisited to ensure it continues to meet changing business requirements. This takes a significant expenditure in money and resources, which is why many businesses – especially small ones with few in-house DR capabilities – often end up with inadequate DR policies and technologies. Sadly, many of those businesses only find out their policies are inadequate when it’s too late.

Because they shift computing and data management to a purpose-built facility designed to withstand any kind of disaster, managed services are an easy, effective way to improve any company’s DR capabilities. Having invested millions of dollars to build a redundant data centre environment that follows industry best practice, BlueFire is able to offer a suite of Managed Disaster Recovery (MDR) services that can help companies of any size get back up and running almost immediately in the event of a disaster.

Should your business be unlucky enough to suffer an interruption, your data and applications will be ready and waiting for you once you’re able to set up temporary office space. Send your employees home to continue working on their own computers, rent a managed office downtown, gather your staff in your living room or raid the local Internet café – it doesn’t matter how you get online, but once you’re there you’ll have access to the same data and applications you were using in your office – using nothing more than a standard Web browser. Just flip a switch, and the rest of the company can get back to work while you manage the disaster recovery effort.

MDR is possible because BlueFire hosts its customers’ data, applications and even their desktops from its highly secure, fully redundant facilities in Sydney’s central business district. Specialised software ensures even data at small branch offices is stored on BlueFire’s ultra-reliable infrastructure. Supported by experienced staff 24x7, the facilities are protected against interruption with fully redundant power, communications links, equipment and data mirroring. So even if your office loses contact, BlueFire will be there, ready and waiting, to help ensure the continuity of your business.

Features	Description
Continuous Data Replication	BlueFire MDR leverages managed application infrastructure and can provide near realtime backup of data from remote premises Continuous replication ensures business continuity by ensuring data at the backup site is always up-to-date
Fully Hosted Applications	If your onsite application servers crash, business can normally stop BlueFire hosts applications from its data centre, providing easy access from any Web browser Staff quickly get back to business, helping customers and keeping the business running while the physical recovery effort is underway
Cost Effective Business Continuity	Conventional DR strategies rely on buying and managing duplicate equipment Leveraging BlueFire’s investment in infrastructure, processes, systems and people provides 100% peace of mind at 50% the cost of doing it yourself
Corporate Governance	Ever more demanding corporate governance policies require businesses to have clearly delineated, effective DR plans BlueFire MDR satisfies these criteria with a secure, available and cost-effective solution guaranteed to keep the business up and running
Guaranteed Availability	Experienced staff monitor and manage the service 24x7 BlueFire Backup is backed by a contractual service level agreement (SLA) with clear financial penalties if BlueFire falls short
End-to-End Security	BlueFire follows security industry best practices as defined in the Banking Grade Security qualification for Information Security

The process of restoring systems, data and infrastructure require supporting key ongoing business operations.
What you need in order to protect your vested interests from unforeseen damage, loss, vandalism, or theft.
An essential service provided by the experts at BlueFire to ensure peace of mind now, while minimising downtime, profit loss, and stress in the future.

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Issues	Resolution
IT Servers crash onsite taking down our application?	BlueFire provides your application online as required to allow you to resume serving customers/users quickly without waiting to restore network functionality onsite.
How can I get access to the application when and from where I need to in the event our primary site is down.	Gain the flexibility of allowing workers to use any PC or Windows mobile devices from any location, even over low-bandwidth connections. Anywhere access to your data from any internet connection.
How can I provide disaster recovery services at cost effective price.	By leveraging the BlueFire investment in infrastructure, processes, systems and people, and for about 50% less than an equivalent internal IT solution, BlueFire provides an insurance package to make your critical applications available on demand in the event of an outage.
How can I manage both my DR site and my primary location?	BlueFire replicates you application data to the Datacentre and manages this infrastructure to be online and available at all times. The infrastructure is managed and supported ongoing.
How is the data the same?	The application data is replicated to the Datacentre to make sure all data is the same. This can be scheduled or live replication for instant updates of last transactions.

Business Continuity Planning for Small and Medium Size Businesses

BCP is the blueprint for how businesses plan to survive everything from local equipment failure to global disaster. Data-oriented BCP, an indispensable component of business planning regardless of organization size, poses the following challenges. Smaller
businesses generally lack the in-house IT resources to achieve these demanding planning, technical and process requirements. Therefore, many SMBs either neglect to implement any data-oriented business continuity plan or else approach data backup and
recovery in a sporadic, rudimentary fashion that fails to conform to the best practices of BCP.

Understanding the risks of not having a plan in place:

Understanding Regulatory Compliance requirements in your industry. Regulations such as the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability, Act (HIPAA) and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) and other laws are critical.

Understanding how to mitigate the risk of losing vital business data, such as customer records.

Being aware of the environmental hazards that the business infrastructure is exposed to due to your geographical location.

Estimating time it would take to build the business back if disaster strikes without having any BCP in place.

Understanding ROI for having a BCP in place.

Technical Challenges

Identify the lowest-cost, highest-performance data backup medium (tape or disk) based solution and keeping abreast with the latest and greatest in the industry.

Ensure that all backed-up data is encrypted and otherwise safeguarded from theft.

Ensure that backed-up data can be restored to different kinds of hardware.

Ensure that data backup continues even during active recovery phases.

Operational Challenges

Identifying what data to back up & Identifying how frequently to back up and related costs and ROI.

Retain the ability to recover not only the most recent data, but also data from older time horizons, such as past quarters and years.

Retain the ability to monitor and manage the integrity of ongoing data backup processes so that backup failures can be diagnosed and remedied before adversely impacting the BCP lifecycle.

The need to hire staff who can understand, design, implement and keep a BCP running 24/7 and be available to get business back in action after disaster strikes.