Business Continuity
The top IT priorities for most business are protecting data and maintaining good quality continuous service. Specific requirements will vary but the basic principles apply universally. We have years of experience protecting systems from data loss and service failure, having advised, designed and implemented the most critical aspects of 24x7 systems for major blue chip firms.
High availability
High availability configurations implement redundancy to allow a service to continue operating during maintenance or after a component failure. A full system view must be taken where high availability is concerned as all components must survive failure for the system to continue operating. A design must consider specialized components and complex configurations and to be effective all aspects of the HA system must tie together seamlessly and be verified. We have implemented many HA configurations using load balancing and clustering technology using a range of vendor platforms.
Disaster recovery
In the event of a catastrophic event at a primary site such as loss of a storage unit, a fire, a flood or persistent power failure, system data must be recovered and service restored. It is critical for all businesses to have a copy of their data at a secondary location. Cloud deployments are not exempt as there can still be service availability failures, cyber attack and tenancy issues due to user error and service expiry. Our consultancy involves making provision for multi-site or multi-cloud operation and documenting and verifying the approach. There are a variety of ways these solutions can be implemented and it depends on the technology, service requirements and budget. All solutions will implement some form of off-site, multi-site or multi-cloud based data replication as well as alternate location compute resources. We always strive to provide the best data protection we can with the tools available, but understand the need to balance cost against system protection.
Performance and Quality of Service
If capacity is reduced or key business procedures are delayed due to poor performance or service this can have a financial impact and damage reputation. Service problems can be difficult to resolve and can bounce between different vendors and support teams. All the while staff are under pressure to keep the business running. We understand the underlying causes of poor system service and performance as we have designed and tuned high performance and web scale systems with millions of users.