Space Age Technologies

Business Risk

With even one IT service down, the ability to do business is compromised. Small and medium businesses for whom IT is business critical, are particularly hard hit when their systems are down. Our Business Risk Solutions for small and medium businesses address two key areas of risk for any IT-dependant organisation :

• Disaster Recovery:
Disaster Recovery is about the ability to restore, or recover from, an application or device failure, due to software or data corruption or a server hardware component failure. This does not include full site failures due to, eg, fire or other disaster.
• Email archival, continuity and compliance:
Due to the virtually uncontrollable and exponential growth of email, providing an in-house archiving solution is both expensive and complex, particularly if this is to be compliant with the ECT Act requirements. In addition, email has become a business critical service which, if down, can have a severe impact on a business’s ability to meet its service levels.

Disaster Recovery:
Our Disaster Recovery solutions address the Level 1 and Level 2 type disaster scenarios:

• Level 1 : Data recovery
This addresses recovery from corruption or loss of, or damage to, the data on a server – whether it is directly accessed by a server application, or a user. Depending on the client requirements, data can be backed up and restored, or even made available for a live switch from one data store to another.
• Level 2 : Application or Server recovery
In the event that an application running on a server, or the server itself fails, a process to recover or make the affected services available again in a given time frame, are addressed as part of our Level 2 recovery solutions. As with the Level 1 restore times, restoring services can be done by a full rebuild of a server, through to a live switch to a standby server for sub -second downtime.

Time to restore for the above is dependent on the solution implemented, which is determined by the budget available. The latter, in turn, is usually determined by the cost to the business of any downtime.

Email archival, continuity and compliance:
Archival of email has, or will become, necessary for almost all businesses due to the massive growth of email data stores. This data may not be deleted, in terms of the ECT Act, as electronic data must be kept for at least five years, and some even longer. In addition, businesses need to have access to emails sent and received by their employees in the event of disputes where such correspondence is required for legal purposes.

Small and medium businesses are generally unable to implement an in-house email archival solution, due to the cost of storage and of managing this amount of data. These businesses need a solution that will store their email in a compliant fashion, while allowing them to keep their in-house email data stores small and manageable.

In addition to archival and compliance, our solution provides email continuity so that, in the event that the in-house email service fails, access to email is maintained through the existing, or a secondary Internet connection. Very few businesses can function without email – it is one of the critical services that almost any business needs access to in as short a time as possible.

Contact us now to find out how our Business Risk solutions can help you to address your organisation’s exposure to risk. Are you concerned about the ability to access old emails in the event of a dispute ?