Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity are important areas for every organisation - if something happens that disrupts your normal operations, how flexible is your IT infrastructure, and how quickly could you re-establish normal operations?

We offer a range of services to address these risks for your IT infrastructure and organisation. The loss of key IT systems is a key Business Continuity issue, but careful selection of technology and effective planning can manage or remove many of the potential threats.

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What areas should I be considering?

The first task is to identify the key resources for your operations. Some organisations require plant and production equipment to be available - but with the growth in service based businesses, many organisation primary concerns are availability of staff and the information and communication systems they use. The most typical situation to consider is loss, or loss of access to, your site(s).

Staff Mobilisation

First priority is to inform staff and mobilise the personnel involved in recovery. Clearstream offer VoIP systems which can be hosted and therefore unaffected by loss of your site. This can allow normal inbound telephone calls to be seamlessly routed to mobiles or VoIP handsets at employees home (or alternative) working locations.

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Customer Communication

Next is to ensure customer communication continues. The three key elements being their Voice Communications, Email Access and Web infomation. There may also be key applications accessed across the web on which your customer rely.

• Voice Communications can be taken care of with VoiP and Unified Messaging technology. Of the many benefits of VoIP, one of the central advantages is that geographical location becomes unimportant. With VoIP and SIP Trunks, any geographical number can ring in any location transparently to the customer. Call recording and centralised management ensures you can control and audit use.

• Email Access can be protected in a number of ways; (i) Hosted Email is not easy to disrupt, even if your buildings facilities are affected. With Microsoft Exchange and Outlook Access staff with access can continue to communication from any location where a web browser is available.
  
  Even if hosted on your site, if your server architecture is based on Virtual Technology from Microsoft or VMWare, then recovery of lost servers can be achieved in minutes. Clearstreams Hosted VMWare services can provide a home for your applications within hours or minutes.
  

• Web Information and Key Applications can also be protected with Server Virtualisation or Server Hosting and Co-Location.

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Remote Working

Many staff activities can be carried out at home or remotely. Where a robust Remote Working infrastructure has been deployed, then it is possible for staff to continue some critical operations from home or alternative locations.

This can provide vital continuity whilst recovery steps are underway and keep your customers informed and served as well as possible. Is is vital to inform key customers if their services are likely to be affected and keep them informed on how recovery steps are progressing.

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Planning Robust Infrastructure

Many common "Disaster" situations are simply caused by loss of IT facilities. Many IT server rooms located in an office or factory buildings are vulnerable to power outages, theft, water damage or loss of network connectivity. In all these cases staff in the affected office and remote offices can be affected.

There are many steps that can be taken to minimise these issues by increasng network resilience, locating servers in purpose-built hosting faciltiies, backing up key data off-site, or designing application infrastructure so that it can be quickly recovered.