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Business Continuity is a relatively new term that is
often thought of as another way to say ‘disaster
recovery’, but in reality means much more. Business
Continuity represents the uninterrupted provision of
operation and services. A service that is continuously
available must be able to tolerate virtually any cause
of failure. Severe weather, physical and cyber attacks,
or strained infrastructures may cause failures at your
primary site.
For this reason, the United States government agencies
have developed guidelines for their financial institutions
which provide worldwide industry best practices.
- The guidelines
endorse establishing back-up sites for operations
and data centers that do not rely on the same infrastructure
and other risk elements as primary sites.
- They expand
on the guidelines citing support for establishing
minimum separation to allow ease of relocating personnel.
- Basically, they
are recommending that a primary data center
should be as geographically close as possible to allow
for ease of relocating personnel while at the same
time sufficiently geographically separated from its
secondary, backup location to ensure that it operates
on separate power grids, telecommunications substations,
water sources, road systems and airports.
The Cayman Islands are fortunate in that they have the
capability to offer the infrastructure to support both
primary and secondary sites within the same legal jurisdiction.
In fact, the topology of the three islands provides
the Cayman Islands the ability to differentiate its
world class financial centre in this area.
The three distinct islands with separate utilities and
public services, one (Cayman Brac) with a natural bluff
of 140 foot elevation and dual undersea fiber connectivity
is the foundation for a world class business continuity
infrastructure.
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While catastrophic outages, such as hurricanes, bring
the need for business continuity to the forefront because
the impact is widespread, the reality is that businesses
are dealing with the negative impact of unplanned downtime
on a routine basis. These more prevalent outages
are actually the biggest threat to organisational resiliency
and represent significant losses. It is for this reason
that BIC’s services span not only those required
to sustain operations throughout the devastating effects
of a natural disaster, but also solutions to the challenges
that companies face day in and day out
- More than ninety
percent (+90%) of all data losses occur because of
virus attacks, power failure, software failures and
human errors.
- As a local service
provider, BIC, can conveniently assist companies to
minimize these potentially routine service outages.
The days when a daily tape backup
provided adequate protection for a business’s
critical processes, are long gone. Regulatory compliance
requires availability of historical data. Employees,
clients and business partners require access to information
on a 24/7 basis. This leaves little room for system
downtime or for the risks of faulty tapes. This means
that companies need services such as secure, real-time,
remote disk to disk backup and restoration of data.
- Continuous
data protection
capability provides the ability to quickly roll back
data not just to the last backup, but to any point
in time.
- Offsite
storage of data provides protection from
outages in the primary site.
- Remote
Access infrastructure capability provides
users the ability to securely login to their applications
from outside their main office. This flexibility is
fundamental to real-time information availability.
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