Business Continuity

Could your business recover from a ransomware attack? How about a natural disaster? How much downtime could your business sustain? Are your mission-critical systems and applications adequately protected?

These questions may be painful to consider, buy knowing the answers is crucial in today’s high-risk business environment.

At BACS, we are well-equipped with the knowledge and expertise needed to safeguard your business systems and recover vital data in the event of a disaster, malware attack, or security breach. We work with you to identify security gaps and evaluate the full scope of your capabilities and the viability of your recovery plan.

Protecting mission-critical systems and ensuring reliable data recovery is not only a security issue; it is a central business concern. It requires smart investments in technology and resources to address today’s increasingly complex IT environments.

That’s where BACS can deliver immense value. Our experts will evaluate the performance of your existing infrastructure and outline your best options. We depict possible disaster situations and analyze the potential impact on your business operations.

With more than 20 years of experience helping companies improve their IT cyber security and streamline their business continuity processes, BACS is ideally positioned to help ease the stress and burden of disaster recovery planning and execution. BACS provides business continuity services and solutions across several core areas:

• Backup and recovery assessment and planning
• Asset protection, risk, and compliance
• Managed recovery, restoration for both physical and virtual environments
• Data retention policies and procedures
• Threat detection and vulnerability analysis
• Business continuity awareness training programs, testing and reporting

For smaller businesses, a service outage could mean a sudden loss of revenue or a slowdown in sales. For larger enterprises the impact could be more drastic, wiping out millions of dollars in revenue, damaging brand reputation, and curtailing business growth.

That’s where BACS can help. Our team can assess your existing IT environment and then develop a business continuity strategy that matches your needs and budget. By assessing the potential impact on business systems, you can prioritize infrastructure and applications and determine your precise uptime and recovery requirements.

We start with a systematic approach designed to identify the systems and applications that are most vital to your business, and then implement corrective measures, including a recovery plan that aligns with your objectives. We take into account core infrastructure needs, performance requirements, and risk tolerances as part of a comprehensive, carefully balanced plan.

With the complex nature of today’s IT environments, your business continuity and recovery approach should include a detailed review of your business and technology needs. What recovery methods do you currently have in place? What is your tolerance for downtime? How do you comply with data retention requirements?

These details provide the framework for developing a data recovery and business continuity strategy that provides an optimal balance between speed, cost, and operational flexibility.

BACS consultants will evaluate the performance capabilities and limitations of your existing infrastructure and outline your best options for improvement.  Our strategic approach begins by understanding what is most important to you and then structuring both proactive and reactive practices that support your business goals.

BACS will work with you to:

• Document business assets. Your disaster recovery plan should contain a detailed and prioritized inventory of core business applications and supporting hardware. Each asset should include vendor contact information and support agreements outlining the scope of responsibilities so you can restore operations and get your business systems back online quickly.
  • Define downtime tolerance.  For each set of applications, we’ll help determine the acceptable recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO). Understanding these dynamics ensures that you invest in the right level of high availability and disaster recovery for the right systems. Prioritizing applications by level of importance will help accelerate the recovery process. We’ll  help you test the plan on a regular basis, as your priority levels could shift with updated results.
• Determine and assign responsibilities. Your business recovery plan should clearly outline the core responsibilities and roles each party will play during a recovery event. This is particularly important when working with third-party providers.  Everyone needs to need to be familiar of each party’s responsibilities to help ensure an efficient and seamless continuity of business operations.
  • Create a communication plan.  When a disaster hits, how will you communicate with employees? Will they know how to access the resources and systems they need to execute their assigned duties?  In many cases, central communication systems (phone and email) will be impacted and other methods of communication will need to be available. Your plan should outline how communication steps and contingencies to keep staff informed and updated from the early stages and throughout the duration of the event.
• Include disasters into your SLAs. If your IT infrastructure is managed by an outsourced provider, make sure your support agreement details their scope of service and level of responsibility should a disaster strike. Gaining clarity of these details early will help eliminate confusion, optimize internal resources, and speed resolution―typically within a defined timeframe.
• Determine how to handle sensitive data and develop an incident response. A key component of your recovery plan is defining the operational and management procedures for safeguarding confidential or sensitive information. The protocols should outline how this information will be managed, secured and accessed once the plan has been initiated.
• Test your plan on a regular basis. Your plan should outline the steps, methods, and frequency of your recovery plan will be tested. Infrequent testing can result in substandard performance of your IT environment, putting your business continuity plan at risk. It’s better to uncover any issues early on rather than have them emerge during a crisis. Determine what needs to be corrected and continue to test until the process is perfected.

At the heart of a robust business continuity plan is a guiding document that defines specific procedures and processes to be carried out in event of a data loss or security breach. This detailed action plan factors in multiple scenarios with defined steps to mitigate the impact of an event and enables critical business systems and processes to be recovered and restored quickly and efficiently.

A written plan by itself, however, does not guarantee a rapid recovery when disaster hits. Communication and training, along with following proper disaster recovery procedures and protocols, are essential elements of an effective recovery program. It’s essential that everyone impacted by an event clearly understands their responsibilities and the role they play in the recovery effort.

Our consultants carefully evaluate your business continuity needs, answering key questions about long-term growth, changes in your data needs, and shifts in business and market strategy. We work with you to define and implement backup and recovery policies and practices based on your tolerance risk, business requirements or mandates specific to your particular market.

While no single strategy can cover all scenarios, it’s essential that you have confidence in your business continuity plan to know exactly how long it will take for operations to be back online―with systems and critical data intact. BACS uses specialized tools to assess the integrity and reliability of your security infrastructure, helping to ensure optimum availability, efficiency and performance.

We evaluate your infrastructure and IT assets and leverage proven techniques and practices to create a plan that achieves an optimum level of protection and risk tolerance.

BACS provides strategic technology guidance in several core areas:

• IT Assessment and Strategy
• Technology Planning and Roadmap Alignment
• Business Application Management
• Information Security Strategy
• Budgeting and Resource Planning
• Benchmarking and performance Assessment
• Technology Capabilities and Systems
• Cloud Strategy and Assessment
• Risk Management and Compliance
• Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

Protecting your critical business systems is not only a security issue; it is a central business concern. It requires smart investments in technology and resources to address an increasingly complex threat landscape.  That’s where BACS can deliver significant value.

With our comprehensive portfolio of business continuity management and data recovery solutions, our team can evaluate your existing IT environment and create a business continuity consulting solution that meets your unique uptime and performance-level demands.

Our consultants will work with you to:

• Manage sensitive data. A key element of your recovery plan is defining the operational and management procedures for safeguarding confidential or sensitive information. The procedures should define and describe how sensitive data will be managed, secured, and accessed once the plan has been initiated.
• Determine backup frequency. Depending on the nature of your business and your unique operational demands, you may need to increase the frequency of your backups. When more frequent and rapid backups are required, we will work with you to create the optimal approach, including implementing more advanced techniques, such as block level incremental (BLI) backups.
• Ensure Scalability. It’s important to create a business continuity management plan that can grow with your business. If you are starting small, we’ll work with you to implement a solution that handles your backups automatically. As your business grows, we’ll work with you to add tools and implement processes to manage backup and recovery in more complex IT environments.
• Optimize cloud capabilities. While the cloud offers efficient continuity and recovery options, it’s essential that you take a calculated, strategic approach when moving data to the cloud, whether it’s owning infrastructure, renting, or adopting a hybrid approach. BACS will work with you to determine optimum price points, evaluate storage media options, and choose the best course of action for your unique needs.
• Ensure proper data retention. New data breach protection and privacy regulations require organizations to retain and segregate specific data types. In some instances, they also require that you delete only certain components of customer data and continue to store other elements. We’ll work with you to make sure your data is stored in the proper format and that any required deletions are properly executed.

At BACS we are a business continuity certified specialist that believes in taking a proactive approach to business continuity and recovery. Implementing the right safeguards and preventive measures upfront helps you better prepare for what needs to happen after a disaster or business disruption strikes.

Our vulnerability assessments provide an in-depth review of your IT infrastructure; identify configuration flaw; and uncover areas of weaknesses that could lead to exposure of your applications or systems. Our detailed recommendations show you how to correct any issues and help reinforce your defenses against rising internal and external threats.

With BACS, you get:

• A detailed analysis of your current business continuity capabilities
• Managed recovery capabilities for both physical and virtual environments
• Quick failover reducing the risk of revenue loss and production downtime
• Ongoing testing and reporting to ensure continuous recoverability
• Customized solutions that carefully align with your business and compliance needs

Depending on the extent of your need and availability of resources, closing the gaps between business needs and business continuity capabilities can be an extended, protracted process. That’s why it’s critical not to delay. Data loss and business disruptions are inevitable. The question is, how quickly will you recover?

For more information on our business phone systems solutions and services, contact us here.

Technology is far too important not to deserve strategic priority. In today’s era of rapid business change, short-sighted decisions can result in costly, ineffective investments and technology complexity. That’s why you need an IT consultant that understands the technology landscape and is focused on helping you solve business challenges, drive efficiency, and build lasting value.

BACS consultants are business continuity certified specialists and are well-equipped with deep industry expertise and the latest tools to systematically evaluate your IT environment. We review your IT support capabilities, pinpointing areas of potential improvement that could have the most impact on business productivity, service quality, and operational efficiency.

Working with an experienced service provider like BACS can help ease the growing burden of IT management while helping your business:

• Stay current with access to the latest technologies
• Identify opportunities for cost optimization
• Meet industry standards for compliance, security and uptime
• Optimize reliability and availability of resources and applications
• Prioritize decisions and plan for new capabilities based on defined business goals