Companies need to beef up disaster recovery plans to combat climate change says the SAS Group

Aug. 3, 2010 - PRLog -- Press Release 03 August 2010

Companies need to beef up disaster recovery plans to combat climate change says the SAS Group

London - The recent flooding at BT’s Paddington exchange, which caused an 84 hour outage of many carrier services, including PSTN, ISDN 2, ISDN 30, mobile, broadband and lease line circuits, and affected thousands of organisations in and around the capital, only serves to highlight the importance of building resilience and business continuity into your network infrastructure, so say network experts at the SAS Group.

According to the SAS Group, very few companies have sufficient resilience built into their networks to withstand a major exchange and backbone outage; most rely on a basic level of circuit disaster recovery that in incidents like this have little benefit as all services are impacted. Any failover voice servers whether ISDN 30, PSTN or even web-based hosted PBX solutions could not be activated, and Internet based solutions were also offline.

“Most firms have some form of disaster recovery and business continuity plan for their applications but when a major loss of communications services is experienced, like the Paddington flood, these simply can’t be invoked,” said Charles Davis, CEO for the SAS Group. “In the case of Paddington, because such a large region was impacted, a lot of companies also found that their disaster recovery centres were affected by the flood as well.”
   
Davis believes that any business whose continuity is dependent on the uninterrupted operation of its network, needs to ensure its technology is adequately protected.

“Historically, the main threats to our network infrastructures have been of human origin; a terrorist attack, an opportunist hacker or, more commonly, an inadequately thought-out change control, but with changes to our weather system, we must now be prepared for a new set of challenges,” said Davis.

To help larger organisations cope with some of the communication challenges presented by climate change, the SAS Group has come up with a list of recommendations.

-   When ordering network services, ensure that, different exchanges are used for supplying the last mile of the services, and have any Internet and MPLS circuits routed via different carrier backbone nodes. By doing this, if any failure occurs in local connectivity, inbound and outbound calls, and internet access can be routed across the MPLS to other international or regional sites to allow the affected office to continue operating.
-   Ensure that any DR sites do not share common exchanges or backbone nodes. This may require the relocation of existing DR sites, in which case staff transportation will also need to be factored into the plan.
-   In the configuration of email systems, ensure that a secondary bridgehead server is located in either a separate country or a region that does not share a common exchange or node. This action, combined with correct DNS management, will ensure that email will failover automatically and be distributed across the unaffected MPLS or public Internet VPN.
-   Since disaster recovery plans usually have less bandwidth available, it is wise to prioritise the applications that will use the network in a DR situation. It may also be judicious to avoid using applications like video conferencing which use large amounts of bandwidth.

For small businesses and single site operations, the SAS Group’s advice is to consider deploying a hosted application system with built-in disaster recovery. By taking this approach, if a major exchange outage occurs, staff can either work from home or be transferred to a nominated location to access systems via an unaffected Internet exchange.  

The SAS Group offers a complete range of infrastructure design services, including technical design authority, network provisioning and disaster recovery. For more information, visit www.sas.co.uk

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About the SAS Group
The SAS Group is a major UK and international provider of IP-based network and managed communications services.  In partnership with leading technology organisations including BT, T-Mobile, Cisco, Microsoft, HP and Symantec, the company specialises in the delivery of unified voice, data and video communications solutions.  Founded in 1989, SAS is headquartered in Horsham, West Sussex.

For more information about the SAS Group visit: www.sas.co.uk

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