Reality check: Modern businesses rely on their digital capabilities now more than ever. Downtime has become a terrifying thing to even utter, let alone consider. This is why an effective business continuity plan has become a cornerstone in every business, with IT-centric businesses being no exception. Business Continuity is all about identifying what your key products are and what you can do to ensure that business continues as usual even in the case of disruptions or catastrophes, no matter the size or cause. In truth, business continuity planning is not such an alien concept even to regular consumers. Ever planned a holiday? Whenever planning a holiday, we think of the worst case scenarios and how we can come out of them unscathed, without ruining our well-earned trip. We set up plans in case something goes wrong with our ‘core services’ and we’re prepared for it. We search for additional taxi services in the area despite having booked a cab already, or we check for alternate routes should we rent a car. It’s never a good idea to go on a vacation unprepared for something to go wrong, and a business should be no different. Being the largest multi-site data centre provider in Malta, we are experienced in the business of keeping our customers’ systems online at all costs. The ideal IT services provider should strive to deliver a redundant solution in every component within their setup. At BMIT, we take great care in adopting this approach, from upgrading our core infrastructure services all the way to training our technical team to adopt best-practice methods for optimal business continuity management. Improving redundancy should always be the utmost priority when it comes to introducing new products within an IT Services provider’s portfolio. Business continuity planning is not such an alien concept even to regular consumers Studies show that the average total cost of unplanned application downtime per year is €1 billion to €2.5 billion for the Fortune 1000 companies. An hour of infrastructure failure costs an average of €100,000 with the number jumping fivefold to €500,000 to €1m in the case of a critical application failure; certainly not numbers to scoff at. The digital world undergoes changes every day and it is imperative to constantly keep working to ensure that the systems are up-to-date and relevant to the present realities. The introduction of new ranges of systems and services that protect customers against common business continuity pitfalls always helps to cement the provider’s commitment to ensure the clients’ uptime. With the world fast approaching an almost completely digitally-dependent era, the dangers of the dark side of the internet become an ever-present reality for the modern digital business. In recent years Distributed Denial of Service attacks, otherwise known as DDoS attacks, have emerged as one of the most disruptive ways in which a business can be brought down to its knees. DDoS attacks are weapons of mass disruption aimed at paralysing internet systems including networks, websites and servers, resulting in lost revenues, compromised site performance and tarnished reputations. BMIT has had to take these dangers into consideration, especially since even ISPs can be targeted, which would put us at a risk of not being able to provide a connection for our customers. In recent years, we’ve launched a multi-tiered DDoS protection and mitigation system to protect our customers from even the most vicious of DDoS attacks. From our experience in the industry, we learnt that best-practice is for our private network’s bandwidth needs to be sourced from multiple providers and delivered across multiple redundant links in order to eliminate the risks of our customers going offline through an outage. This setup ensures that our clients are hosted on a reliable and certified ISO27001 network which does not rely on a singular connection. At BMIT we offer clients various features which help ensure continuity for their business. We now have a multi-tiered DDoS protection and mitigation system protecting our redundant 40gbps private international network. This network consists of multiple geographically-separated links, each of which can take over traffic load should there be any faults in the other links. Moreover, we have multiple data centres and international points of presence which form a key part of business continuity plans for our customers. Geo-redundancy is a critical aspect of business continuity for international customers, and our presence across countries addresses this. For example, some clients mirror their servers from one data centre to another. In addition, we also offer several backup options as well as managed services options to help our clients achieve a robust business continuity plan. As part of our portfolio, our customers can also tap into several tools to manage their systems, including advanced firewall solutions as well as virtual load-balancing services. Ultimately, each of our redundant service offerings is a step forward in our customers’ pursuit to ensuring their business stays up. Customers’ feedback is vital and should always be taken into consideration. Good business continuity practices are a top priority for clients and usually the main reason why providers with great core infrastructures for business continuity retain customers. Sources: https://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20170528/business-news/What-s-business-continuity-management-and-why-does-your-business-need.649236

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What’s business continuity management and why does your business need it?