Uptime and availability – requirements that any business needs in order to grow and avoid unwanted losses. Unfortunately, many companies are not adequately prepared for overcoming an unintended disaster. Combined with the immense cost of outages and downtime, this generation of management executives must evolve the whole idea of what it means to be prepared.
Traditionally, guarding against disaster has meant investing a lot of time and energy into multiple, separate systems for disaster recovery, resiliency, uptime and security. Times have changed. As new threats rise and IT systems grow more diverse and complex, businesses must consider a holistic approach to protecting their data centers, operations and critical systems. Overall IT system resiliency requires a unified approach to all facilities management functions. We recently published a white paper, in cooperation with Data Center Frontier, on this very subject. In this article, we summarize the key takeaways.
Understanding Resiliency
First, a quick caveat – there is nothing wrong with protecting IT systems via multiple solutions that provide disaster recovery, high availability, backup and cyber security. These solutions are critical pieces of the overall resiliency apparatus. However, it’s important to understand that these are all single-point strategies. None of them, on their own, can protect against the entire set of threats that today’s IT systems face.
Rather, resiliency is about ensuring that a business can bounce back quickly from a disruption with all systems running. To accomplish this, enterprises and their data center partners need to take a holistic, systematic and simultaneous approach to implementing proactive disaster recovery, IT security, compliance and continuity planning. So, what are your critical systems environments and how can you improve their resiliency in a holistic manner?
How to Protect Critical Systems
Critical environments are where the backbones of organizations live – they’re basically the sum of every facility, process and tool that goes into protecting your data and operational traffic. They require maxim uptime and value without compromising health, safety and security. When you think about it from a holistic perspective, the only way to really ensure the resiliency of these critical environments is through exceptional know-how, services and people.
Improving resiliency means unifying an organization’s entire plan to address all aspects of critical environment services delivery. Because many businesses do not have the time or in-house expertise to manage this themselves, they need to work with a data center partner that offers not only critical environments services, but also leading-class operational teams to support emerging requirements.
A strong data center provider should be able to handle all areas of service delivery ranging from health and safety, hiring and training, to process improvement, tools and systems. However, here’s something to remember – you can’t manage what you can’t see. That’s why a good data center partner should employ a wide range of tools and training designed to provide you with total visibility into all the activity inside your mission-critical environment. This could include offering everything from document control and financial reporting to complying with recognized standards like PCI, HIPPA, ISO 9001 and SSAE 16 (SOC1 & 2). There’s obviously a lot more that can be said about how to make sure you’re choosing the right provider, but we cover that in our white paper, which you can download here.
Stream – Experts in Creating and Managing Resilient Critical Environments
Here’s the key point. At Stream, we believe that modern organizations already have enough to worry about when it comes to improving their own business efficiencies and growing their customer base. That’s why they need a flexible partner with experience in delivering best-in-class resiliency services. For us, it’s about transforming our clients’ infrastructure and managing their facilities to keep pace with changing business demands.
Through our Critical Environments Services, we allow IT professionals to plant seeds for their businesses and spend less time putting out fires. Our commitment to comprehensive facilities management and 100% uptime ultimately optimizes the total cost of data center ownership. We do this by concentrating on the following five categories of mission-critical oversight:
While we’re flexible to each customer’s need, we never waver in our ability to provide highly trained technicians who provide skilled operational services across a combined portfolio of Stream-owned, as well as client-owned, facilities. We’re driven and passionate when it comes to facilities management. Download our white paper to find out more about how a partnership with Stream can benefit your business.
Remember, failing to plan is planning to fail. Take advantage of our deep-seated expertise in business resiliency and talk to us about your mission-critical IT operations!
