Ok so, your management directed you to look for Disaster Recovery Seats for your business, now what? And why?
Before we tackle this seemingly problem-connoting IT need, let’s consider you and your type of business. Say, you, as an IT manager or CIO, CTO or any leader for that matter, was asked to play out a worst case scenario for your company, including but not limited to earthquakes, floods, typhoons, fire or any business-halting unforeseen events.
Sure, one can have a billion interpretations on how your company will emerge from a disaster, but in terms of best practices, or short of calling them standards, there exists a school of thought enveloped within the framework of Business Continuity.
Business Continuity
Business Continuity, among its elements, points to the most cost & effort appropriate series of actions that companies can take in order to “weather the storm, err, disaster.” This holistic approach, ensures that all segments of the core operations have a redundant and equally operational counterpart that when activated, will ensure the smoothest transition in cases of untoward incidents. And this is not limited to IT solutions, but a careful and top-to-bottom checklist of activities that help businesses react appropriately.
And while some enterprises can afford a certain level of downtime, industries like banking & finance, BPO, telcos & ISPs, and critical government agencies cannot afford crippling lags and unavailability. And driven by standard & government regulations (in the case of BSP Circular 951 for BFSIs), it is an integral part of the requirements.
An often-overlooked aspect of Business Continuity are the so-called Disaster Recovery (DR) Seats. Simply, Disaster Recovery Seats are the real estate aspect of Business Continuity that allows corporations to have available, usable work areas where support and critical business segments can be used to continue operations. In a nutshell, DR Seats helps businesses pick up from their now inoperable/unavailable work area.
Disaster Recovery Seats
To put DR Seats in a different context, consider this: your company loses its primary office location, but your team is intact, and given the proper tools, can still converge and operate. The DR Seats offer a resilient alternate office where the employees can run to.
And while skeptics may say that because of Work-from-Anywhere arrangements, DR Seats are less relevant, the fact for business-critical enterprises is that certain equipment and tools are better off hosted in facilities like data centers where utilities like power, connectivity, and IT infrastructure is redundant is very important in ensuring that the definition of “recovery” is strictly adhered to.
And in terms of usability, of course DR Seats must be complemented by other components like data, man & machine. And this is where the question of whether any location can be deemed as a DR site.
To answer this question, one simply has to define the worst case scenario, where traditional office locations are not equipped with ultra redundant and reliable equipment to pass as DR Seats. In the case of data center facilities like Beeinfotech PH, the DR Seats take advantage of data center grade facilities and utilities to ensure that it has the HIGHEST level of reliability, availability and accessibility. So to take a swipe at ordinary office spaces turned “DR Seats,” they unfortunately are not the same. Data center driven Disaster Recovery Seats offer an unparalleled degree of service that no plain office-turned-DR site can match.
Next Steps
Ironically, the last part of this article should be the first to be asked, what should a business do first? Since DR Seats add to the operational expense, one must first ask if a downtime will put the business in an irrecoverable position. If the answer is yes, read on. But if the answer is no, a segmented DR of resources and not seats(mostly on the data) is what’s needed the most, like colocation and/or cloud setup.
To those whose answer is a yes to a DR seat, the next question is on how many seats and what else should be considered? While that determination is a separate article altogether, the rule of thumb is that the number of DR Seats must cover the most minimal headcount needed in continuing some semblance of the business. And since DR Seats are enveloped around the concept of Business Continuity, the question of data, computing equipment, connectivity and other tools must be equally considered.
Beeinfotech PH, a telco neutral facility, offers Bee SURE Seats that delivers data center-grade work areas with fully redundant power, connectivity & other network facilities and other optional add ons like desktops/laptops, VDI, server and NOC/SOC rooms.
For more information, visit https://www.beeinfotech.ph/ or email info@beeinfotech.ph