Continuity - IT Strategy

CONTINUITY

UOTG 4C Technology Management

Our 4C Technology Management Approach

In an UOTG survey, over 80 percent of business executives admitted that their business could not tolerate more than twenty minutes of downtime before incurring significant issues. If you’re one of them, you understand the importance of continuity: the need to plan for unscheduled interruptions to normal operations.

These can crop up at any time and often when you least expect them: they can be something as major as a natural disaster or as mundane as a lack of heating in winter, but the net result is the same. Work is interrupted, business grinds to a halt, and losses start to mount.

Answering Difficult Questions

Continuity in UOTG’s 4C technology management approach explores how to best protect your organization from such risks.

The analysis we perform will help you answer the following questions: how prepared are you for unscheduled downtime? Are your IT systems sufficiently protected to cope with interruptions? Or do you deal with interruptions reactively, lengthening their impact to the business and increasing their cost?

We’ll work with you to construct a reliable system for protecting data against potential loss. Any such plan must incorporate the following features:

Personnel access

Critical business functions must be available to employees, customers, suppliers, regulators, and other entities that require access to those functions. These activities include management, system backups, change control, and help desk.

Regularly scheduled activities

A rigidly followed schedule of activities – backups and other maintenance work included – helps maintain service, consistency, and recoverability. Backups are especially important, but are not always performed properly – how often do the backups fail to run to completion? If the backups do run correctly, how often does the organization test to see if a restoration would actually be successful?

Rational price tag

The cost of the steps to protect data and business functions should be in proportion to their value. Many different data protection methods are now available at a broad range of costs.

Secured data

Securing data and systems from unauthorized access is also a very important goal. This requires that copied data be transferred off-site, or eventually stored in a secure data center, is a key goal. Leveraging the cloud for data storage is thus a common element of strong continuity plans.

Maximizing Continuity, Minimizing Downtime

To better understand the right type of continuity solution for your business, your United Office Technologies Group team will look at the criticality of your data in terms of how long your business can function without the data, and how recent the data copy needs to be.

We’ll also see how what kind of access your people need to the application, communication and collaboration tools they depend on to keep the business running.

We’ll review a number of different possible situations, with the help of legal or compliance experts regarding the relevant obligations around data storage.

CREATE A PLAN

Over 80% of business executives admitted that their business could not tolerate more than twenty minutes of downtime before incurring significant issues.

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