Disaster Management with Recovery in Mind

Perhaps the largest drawback of today’s technology advancements is the speed at which electronic information is exchanged has become the norm, and when that technology doesn’t work as previously experienced or advertised, dissatisfaction and impatience begins to swell. It’s not too far of a stretch to say, “When technology stops working, the workforce stops.” because end-user productivity is at a minimum hindered, if not halted altogether.

As IT professionals, we often think of Disaster Recovery (DR) as being the IT department’s responsibility, and being the IT professionals we are, the IT aspect of DR should be our main focus. After all, today’s industries are highly dependent on IT infrastructure. Just take a look at the many industries GANTECH supports (banking, education, elections processing, human resources, public safety, social security, transportation, video gaming, video security, the list continues) and you’ll see we are highly impacted by the availability of a properly operating IT infrastructure.

However, we must not lose site of the big picture: DR entails more than just getting the infrastructure (network, servers, storage, etc) online and available in the shortest possible time. Depending on the disaster, there can be employee and customer safety issues to do deal with as well as the logistics required to put employees and customers back into a productive state. Even though the IT department will be hard at work to bringing up the IT infrastructure, they will need a business continuity plan that sets priorities for which systems come on line first. This plan is a corporate effort that needs to be driven from the “C” level.   Management buy in is key and will ensure the success of recovery efforts.

What is a disaster? The term disaster becomes broad in meaning when asked of people from different job roles, yet all will agree on one thing: disasters are unwelcome and generally unavoidable events that come with the territory. Disasters that effect IT operations come in many forms, from a simple hard drive failure in a desktop to a natural disaster that causes loss of data center operations. However, the impact of a disaster can be greatly reduced when properly planned for and managed. So, instead of defining the disaster it may be best to define the solution(s) that will provide recovery from a disaster, no matter how small or great.

GANTECH is a total package DR solutions provider. GANTECH will review and analyze customer’s DR plans to suggest improvements or assess their circumstances and build an effective DR plan from top to bottom. GANTECH will then perform all the necessary systems reviews with the stake holders, educating them on the business continuity needed. Lastly, GANTECH performs a full BIA (Business Impact Analysis) for all of the customers corporate IT systems and processes including associated recommendations on how to best achieve the agreed upon level of disaster recovery preparedness. GANTECH’s goal is to provide effective disaster recovery for our customers, ensuring 99.9% uptime under extreme circumstances with an imperceptible transparency to the user community.

There is no one size fits all DR solution. As a systems integrator, GANTECH utilizes emerging technologies to not only provide innovative solutions that will maintain the business health of our customers, but also accelerate the business growth of our customers. GANTECH is strategically partnered with industry leading technology vendors to provide these powerful IT management solutions. In addition, GANTECH provides the personnel with subject matter expertise to implement innovative DR solutions, while using industry standard processes to manage the project.