Always-On Infrastructure for Cayman Companies

The needs of business today require a technology infrastructure built for resilience. BIC has built the facility, assembled the staff and established the technology partnerships to create and deliver highly available solutions to address these for nearly a decade.

 

Provisioning these solutions, all from one provider eliminates complexity thereby lowering costs. BIC provides these types of services to many Caribbean-based businesses; giving them peace of mind, everyday.

 

Solutions for Disaster Resilience

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.

Solutions for Resilience from Routine Outages

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 24x7x365 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.
  • Climate controlled storage of media provides long term protection of data.
  • 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.