Data Center Services

sBusiness continuity, disaster recovery, risk mitigation, and high availability are both essential and often mandatory in today’s global environment. Designing and implementing a cost effective, yet comprehensive plan and secondary data center for compliant resilience can be challenging to most IT organizations.  RKON IT infrastructure experts have helped scores of companies determine the right plan for their unique requirements and budgetary constraints and we can help you protect your business assets and maintain business continuity.

Clearly, over the past several years, companies have been assailed by a myriad of economic, security, competitive, and technological changes. It is no longer a 9 to 5 world, global competition doesn’t sleep. As businesses become increasingly more globally mobile, implement enterprise applications, deliver applications via network and web based technologies, and respond to the demand for more ubiquitous communications and collaboration (including customers and suppliers) the perimeters of security become gray and the risk to business disruption for any number of causes rises.

Whether we are talking about a company’s supply chain, its manufacturing operations, a hospital’s patient record system, doctor access to clinical applications, an insurance claims database or client services, a borkerage’s transaction logs, a distributor’s eOrder Management System, collaboration among the legal team of remote attorneys on a major class action, or simply emailing this week’s expenses, secure access and high availability to information systems is vital to business health.

According to a University of Texas study, “Only 6 percent of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss survive, while 43 percent never reopen and 51 percent close within two years.” Yet, many companies, in fact, most small to mid-size firms, don’t have a comprehensive plan to recover from disaster, yet alone a plan for business resilience.

According to research conducted by the AberdeenGroup only about 50% of best-in-class (Top 20%) companies have been using a high availability strategy for more than three years, compared to fewer than 50% of average to lower performing (remaining 80%) companies. More than one third of the lower performing (bottom 30%) companies are still just thinking about adopting high availability plans.

Why? Remedies to disaster recovery, unplanned downtime, security breaches, and other disruptions are believed to be too expensive for most companies to implement based on traditional thinking around system redundancy.

However, recent regulations now require companies to support more stringent availability standards. Several new acts and regulations, directed at specific industries or a broad cross-section of companies, mandate the protection of business data and system availability. Businesses may incur penalties for failing to comply with these data or business availability requirements. Are you affected by any of these mandates?

• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)—ensures that only properly authorized individuals have access to confidential patient health data and provides long-term guidelines to secure confidential information. HIPAA mandates a five-day maximum turnaround on requests for information.

• Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002—stipulates that CEOs and CFOs attest to the truthfulness of financial reports and to the effectiveness of internal financial controls. Sarbanes-Oxley mandates a required timeframe in which to report financial results—each quarter and at year-end. Failure to make these deadlines can result in financial penalties.

• New Basel Capital Accord (Basel II)—requires financial institution capital reserves to include operational and credit risks and includes IT security risk as a principal operational risk. Basel II also requires business resiliency standards for any financial institution doing business in the EU.

• Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999—limits access to non-public information to those with a “need to know” and requires safeguarding of customer financial information. Loss of important data can lead to penalties for the financial institution.

• Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001—defines what information can be made available to Federal and local authorities for those suspected of terrorism or terrorist related activities. This act requires contacted institutions to respond within a specific timeframe to requests for information from databases.

As companies are mandated to account for business continuity, high availability, and disaster recovery, the immediate reaction is to focus simply on keeping the business running 24/7 by combining them into a single initiative to reduce cost.  However, most companies quickly realized a broader set of skills, experience, and more focused staff resources are required.  At RKON Technologies, we have brought together a team of experts with significant experience in business continuity, regulatory compliance, security, disaster recovery, and secondary data center design.

Through countless assessments, designs, and implementations over the past ten years, RKON Technologies has developed a proven, comprehensive methodology to assist our clients in developing the best business solution to meet their business resilience planning requirements.

RKON’s Business Continuity Technology Planning Methodology is depicted below.  We have developed this methodology to blend the client’s current state with their business requirements and new technology to create a cost effective and efficient technology blueprint for building a secondary data center.

RKON Technologies offers a range of service, solution, and support options to our clients, beginning with an assessment of your Business Continuity and Resilience requirements. In our experience, many companies simply don’t know where to start or what the scope of their needs require. Our experienced consultants can save you the time and associated costs with defining the requirements for the solution that best fits your business objectives and budget.

Call RKON today for an assessment of your business continuity planning and secondary data center design needs.