Enhancing your disaster recovery plan

There are many options available to ensure you have a solid disaster recovery plan in place. Many people, for example, wouldn’t be aware that by moving to VoIP, your disaster recovery capabilities can be significantly enhanced.

Fault tolerant IP access (i.e. a primary and a backup service) will allow for failover of both inbound and outbound calls (not generally possible with PSTN and ISDN). You could also opt to have another phone system sitting in an off-site data centre that could take over if your primary system at head office fails – much as you would for data and application servers.

With appropriate backup systems in place, if a network outage occurs at head office you might simply send people home. As long as they have appropriate broadband connectivity, they will have access to their files and applications and will be able to make and receive calls via a “softphone” client or IP handset from their home.

In fact, staff equipped with laptops and appropriate wireless access do not even have to go home. They could effectively work from anyway there is wireless coverage, which is just about anywhere in CBD, metro and many regional areas.

What about staff that don’t have a company supplied laptop? Why not provide them access to the files and applications they need via Citrix or Windows Terminal Services? This allows you to provide secure access to corporate infrastructure via 3rd party PC’s without too many concerns regarding support.

There are plenty of other readily available technology options that can be employed to improve your disaster recovery plan, however having a backup environment like this in place is a key strategy that should be considered.

Fault tolerant access (as briefly mentioned in reference to VoIP carriage above) is another area of consideration. Telarus offers a couple of options here, being “channel bonding” and backup links.

Channel bonding is a technique whereby multiple identical data services are combined to deliver total bandwidth equal to the sum of the services being bonded (e.g. you can bond two 4Mb/s SHDSL services to provide 8Mb/s of symmetric bandwidth).

Aside from providing increased bandwidth, this also provides some level of redundancy. In the event that one of the services fails you will still have connectivity via the remaining service/s. Telarus will bond up to four services if required.

However, bonding does not cover you for an issue with the infrastructure related to a given type of access service. As such, many customers opt to have a backup service delivered via a different carrier and/or technology type.

For example, Telarus could provide you with an Ethernet access from Optus and an SHDSL backup service from AAPT-PowerTel. In many cases the backup service could also be a fixed wireless link, which is connected via a mast on the roof rather than via the ducts at the base of the building.

Speak to your Telarus Account Manager or Solutions Engineer for more information.