Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

When we think of Disaster Recovery we are tempted to think of extreme cases such as terrorist activity however the vast majority are far more mundane. The flooding of Waltham electricity switching station for instance in May 2008 is an example of these frequent events that can be devastating for business. Man Consulting believes that an effective business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan is an extremely important service. To this end we have established a business continuity and disaster recovery suite offering a full IT infrastructure including secure connectivity via remote access, designed to enable our clients to continue to operate with the minimum of disruption.

We also recognise that access to an office suite may not be required in a lot of instances. Instead the provision of a structured continuity plan which qualifies and quantifies the risks and exposure points to the business has taken on far greater importance.

To assist in this area, Man Consulting have developed a facility that will enable a client to identify, document and implement controls and contingency activities that will either reduce or eradicate the impact of a problem in the event of an incident.

These incidents can occur due to wide ranging reasons such as:

• Simple hardware failure
• Prolonged loss of power
• Local incident preventing access to premises
• Fire or flood
• Health epidemic

We are constantly told prevention is better than cure, and this is no different in the world of IT systems. Disaster Recovery (DR) is only part of a Business Continuity strategy, so we need to think of the bigger Business Continuity picture before focusing on DR.

Before you go any further you need to consider these two acronyms and quantify them for your business:

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - the time the business can tolerate being without the service
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - the point in time the business would find acceptable to fall back to, if a problem occurred

Somewhere in the range from completely replicating the business on the other side of the world to doing nothing, there is an appropriate solution for any business, to meet your specific needs.

Why MAN Consulting?

MAN Consulting have a history of deploying cost-effective solutions covering all levels of Business Continuity requirements. From providing Continuous Availability servers offering zero downtime and uninterrupted processing with no loss of user service in your local environment, through midrange clustering style, failover solutions offering high - but not continuous – availability, to offsite managed hosting of replicated servers for more serious incident recovery.

Increasingly, virtualisation solutions are playing a part in enabling DR solutions and a combination of the appropriate technologies from MAN Consulting can provide your business with a highly effective Business Continuity strategy at reasonable cost.

The service is delivered initially through the aid of our experienced Consultants, all of whom have extensive practical knowledge of a wide cross section of businesses. The Consultant will design and implement your Business Continuity Plan, before passing over to your Business Continuity Support Team who will ensure that the plan continues to mirror the circumstances within your IT infrastructure.

In doing so the team will always remain familiar with your circumstances, which is essential for the success of the plan in the event of a disaster. This will be further enhanced by the regular test invocations Man Consulting always recommend as part of the overall service level associated with the plan.