Your state, local, or educational (SLED) organization may be operating on borrowed time if you don’t have a business continuity and disaster recovery plan in place. Natural catastrophes have never been more threatening than they are right now. According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 20 separate weather and climate events caused at least $1 billion in damage in 2021.
At Thrive, we understand you require an IT infrastructure that is strong, secure, and resilient. That’s why our solutions provide customers with several advantages, including safe, dependable business continuity and data recovery.
A disaster recovery plan (DRP), in its simplest form, is a collection of guidelines, tools, and processes designed to change how critical technological systems and infrastructure are restored or maintained following a natural or man-made disaster.
The terms disaster recovery planning (DRP) and business continuity planning (BCP) are frequently used interchangeably.
Disaster recovery plans focus on the steps that must be taken before, during, and after a loss. In contrast, BCP is the preventive process set up before managing a disaster.
Unplanned downtime examples include:
- Cyberattacks
- Hardware failure
- Software failure
- Power outages
- Data corruption
- External security breaches
- User error
At Thrive, we keep your infrastructure operational.
The following are five advantages Thrive can provide for your BCP:
- Minimal Data Loss, Fast Recovery. For protection against incidents that could completely disrupt regular business operations, Thrive offers NextGen IT business continuity solutions that minimize data loss and offer quick, automated recovery of essential systems. Thrive’s Cloud-based Enterprise-class business continuity solutions are ideal for organizations of any size. They are tested and proven DR solutions to meet demanding recovery objectives.
- Priority Restoration Approach. An essential part of an effective business continuity plan is identifying your company’s mission-critical deliverables, prioritizing restoration, and conducting a proactive risk assessment to determine key risk factors that can disrupt processes. To guarantee that the response tactics and data security techniques stay relevant, Thrive’s disaster recovery plan, which includes a BCP framework, is most successful when updated and tested regularly.
- Cost Savings. Developing and executing a DR plan is often limited due to budget, technology, resources, or the availability of skilled professionals onsite. That’s where Thrive comes in. Our Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) offering is a cloud computing service model that allows an organization to back up its data and IT infrastructure in a third-party cloud computing environment. This makes it possible to regain access and functionality to IT infrastructure after a disaster.
- Rapid Deployment.. Thrive’s Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) provides virtually no data loss and costs less than increasing the recovery speed of the current provider. The Thrive team can virtualize physical web servers and set up shadow servers in a Virtual Private Cloud.
- Monitoring 24x7x365. Thrive offers complete access to our Network Operations Centers (NOCs), which are staffed by senior technicians and disaster recovery experts and accessible 24x7x365 to implement your DRaaS plan in the event of a disaster or an emergency. Our specialized monitoring and alerting procedures safeguard your vital systems and data.
Thrive’s business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions assist our clients in being prepared for the worst.
Contact our team today to learn more.
In this Help Net Security video, Chip Gibbons, CISO at Thrive, illustrates the differences between a business continuity plan and a disaster recovery plan.
“When important systems become unavailable due to infrastructure failure, human error, or a security breach, it can lead to unaffordable business interruption,” said Chip Gibbons, CISO, Thrive, a provider of managed services.
“The best way to ensure an organization is prepared is to have business continuity and disaster recovery plans on hand.”
Overnight, the COVID-19 pandemic has permanently changed our approach to remote IT and security. We went from offices full of collaboration and activity to at home offices now exposing businesses and corporate data to increased risk. At Thrive, we hold a daily management meeting to review and discuss the implications of a remote workforce during this experience. Many organizations are following a similar protocol as well, and although it has taken some getting used to, it has shined a light on how well we are able to collaborate remotely.
Our president, Marc Pantoni, mentioned the other day on one of these calls that the focus at the beginning of the Work From Home period was stability but as it matures, many organizations will start to focus on risk management as they were during prior to this unplanned event.
Over the years, we’ve seen disaster recovery tests become quite commonplace but now we’ll start to see pandemic tests or WFH tests become much more prevalent. This isn’t fear mongering, it’s prudent risk management. I surmise that like many of you, my work from home plan was my laptop sitting on a home office desk or perhaps a kitchen table. My home office did not have all the trappings of my branch office. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve gotten quite efficient at WFH and for many end users that environment is here to stay even once we all return to the office semi-full time.
Securing that location will now become a higher priority. For many senior leaders and high-tech workers, we will look to high value yet low effort solutions to protect the household. For years network security companies have added a feature to their devices that is not very widely used that can provide “clean” network connections. This function, usually called transparent mode, introduces unified threat management appliances into home networks without changing the overall topology of the environment. This means that we can add intrusion prevention and malware protection at the network level without the needing to swap out the consumer wifi solutions, which are very popular. Fact is, having malware on a home network is as big of a problem as it is on an office network regardless of where it resides.
To understand this concept a little easier, here’s a simple network diagram:
These solutions are extremely straightforward to setup and maintain as opposed to creating a branch office inside a home office. It allows for added protection of all devices on the network without the headache of redesigning the entire home network.
If you have questions or concerns about remote IT and security, Thrive is here to help. CONTACT US TODAY!
There is nothing any business fears more than a complete collapse of its IT systems. The financial cost of such an outage can be great, and additionally retrieving the data and rebuilding the system into its former state is often an extremely time consuming and logistically complex proposition. Businesses have literally gone under due to such IT issues, and although this is something that many companies dread, often SMEs don’t have sufficient provisions in place to provide effective disaster recovery.
It is a basic facet of human psychology that we often assume that the best case scenario will occur, and nothing fundamentally will go wrong. This tendency is amplified in the case of disaster recovery, where providing satisfactory backup for a business can involve a certain financial outlay.
In the current economy, many businesses across the globe are seeking alternatives to costly data backup methods. A popular solution to costly backup methods is cloud backup, which works well as a strategy for business continuity planning and disaster recovery. Data backup and storage in the cloud means that the cloud service provider takes responsibility for costly backup hardware and redundancy methods. The company seeking cloud storage pays a monthly subscription fee, which is based on the amount of backup and storage which is required.
In order to successfully backup and store data in the cloud, you must choose a reliable provider that has a track record for using multiple backup servers, advanced security, and immediate access and recovery in the event of a disaster. A lot of companies prefer to pursue the best of both worlds by combining the speed of local backup with the security of cloud backup. This concept is known as hybrid backup and is more cost effective than tape methods and other offsite storage methods.
When it comes to keeping your business up and running, it is all about the time factor. Time determines how fast you can recover business operations in the event of an outage or natural disaster. If you have already completed a risk assessment, the business impact analysis ensures that you do not incur additional expenses which can result from slow recovery time.
Although you may have already completed a risk assessment and you know what critical business operations must be recovered, this will not matter unless you can recover them within a reasonable amount of time. By conducting a business impact analysis this will ensure efficient business continuity in the event of a catastrophe.
So what are some of the key components you should consider when conducting a business impact analysis?
The events of September 11, 2001 changed a lot of things including the manner in which businesses assess risk and devise plans to deliver critical services in the event of a disruption. Although catastrophic events have a minimal probability, the businesses that plan carefully for business continuity are the ones that stand the best chance of continuing their services in the event of a disaster.
It does not take a monumental catastrophe to disrupt daily operations of a business. Sometimes it can be something as simple as a power outage or intermediate interruptions that result from a storm or an attack instigated by cyber criminals.
Having a business continuity plan in place means arranging to continue to deliver services which are the most critical to business operations and identifying the resources which are needed to support business continuity. In order for a business continuity plan to be effective there are key critical components that must be present during the planning process.
Network Security in today’s high tech environment is now more important than ever. Hackers and cyber criminals have gotten very sophisticated in the methods they use to carry out exploits. For many companies this means added layers of security and infrastructures which create a network with many different facets.
In today’s economy many businesses do not have the resources which are required to implement the necessary equipment and employ staff with the skills to maintain network security. This represents a very real challenge for companies in terms of data security, business continuity and productivity. This is where network protection services can be invaluable when it comes to protecting company assets. (more…)