Disruptions to business happen. And unfortunately, planning for interruptions is of particular importance in today's environmental and social climate. The increased threat of terrorism, the risk of viruses, security breaches, hardware failures and infrastructure outages has enhanced the priority that business has placed on their continuity plans.
At TELUS, we have developed extensive technology and strategies as part of our business continuity plan. We've tested and implemented our disaster recovery solutions internally and now we're making them accessible to our customers.
business continuity planning
A business continuity plan will help you minimize the risks of downtime costs, lost revenue, and potential damage to your reputation. Beyond IT infrastructure issues, business continuity planning accounts for employees, customers, shareholders, communications issues and recovery strategies.
network design & management
As a major technology user in our own right, we're concerned about single points of failure. So, we have developed extensive redundant network designs to protect our data and our customers' data; see '
being redundant is a good thing' (
TELUS scope, April 2003). We've also developed
intelligent Internet Data Centres that contain secure, state-of-the-art hardware and software housed in centres that are fully redundant, monitored around the clock and designed to be completely fail-safe.
disaster recovery planning
Disaster recovery planning is a fundamental component of an overall business continuity plan. Recovering systems after a disaster depends on the location of recovery, connectivity (bandwidth), hardware capable of operating the systems and current backups of the software and data. Our strategy for disaster recovery is continual risk assessment and identification of cost-effective ways to mitigate those risks.
TELUS and many of our customers have created a challenging systems management environment including hundreds of servers, thousands of internal disk drives and tapes. In some situations we have discovered that our customers have no back up plans for their mid-range services, often containing their key systems, SAP, Peoplesoft and other ERP applications. If a disruption were to happen, resultant outages could be one week or longer.
In order to protect against such disruptions, TELUS has developed a robust DRP solution that leverages our multiple Internet Data Centres across the country, (offering system mirroring storage area networks and network attached storage replications, remote electronic vaulting solutions). As a further safeguard, TELUS performs systems backups that are physically flown to and stored at the Sunguard facilities in Philadelphia. Recovery is possible within 24, 36 or 48 hours of the tapes arriving at the Recovery Centre.
A number of our valued customers have adopted the same DRP plan through TELUS, including the Government of BC, Finning and Envision.
geographical information systems
In the event of a disaster, it is vital that critical business assets can be located.
TELUS created the first Canada-wide managed Geographical Information System
GeoExplorerŽ as a state-of-the-art, Web-based GIS application which stores and links layers of data to geography.
The application can be used in many disaster recovery and business continuity functions. For example, automated vehicle location (a combination of GPS and GIS; Wireless and Web technologies) provides real time fleet monitoring that enables clients in Energy, Municipal, Transportation and many other industries to quickly track assets, customize reporting capabilities, provide two-way communications and support Work Alone safety standards.
See an example of our emergency response technology in action at Hunt Oil
Although disruptions to business do happen, we're here to help make them easier to handle and assist you in planning and implementing the right solutions to your unique situation.
links
volume 1, issue 4, august 2003 | issue archive |
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