For many organisations that have disaster recovery arrangements and business continuity plans the most difficult decision is deciding when to invoke these arrangements. If the building has been destroyed then it is a simple decision; no building, then relocate and recover IT systems.

If the problem being faced is IT system failure or an incident that temporarily removes organisations from their building the decision is much more difficult. This is because recovering IT systems from point in time system back-ups on to replacement computer hardware is disruptive, time consuming and risks loss of un-backed up business transactions. The diagram below identifies the issues:

RPO is the recovery point objective; this could be described as the acceptable amount of business transactions an organisation is prepared to lose if they recover from back-ups. RTO is recovery time objective, the time that is acceptable for the recovery of systems after an incident. BIP services provides:

• RPO of 0 to minimal loss of data.
• RTO of 15 minutes

An organisation rebuilding from traditional point in time back-ups, such as removable media,  risks losing all of the data from the last successful back-up through to the point of the incident/disaster. Recovering systems from traditional back-ups is technically complex, very time consuming and can result in many days of lost system availability.

BIPs protects IT systems up to the point of the failure and can rebuild a failed server to a useable state within 15 minutes, independent of the amount of disk storage attached to the server. This means that no matter what type of incident occurs recovery of the IT systems is no longer a limiting factor to the success of the disaster recovery arrangements or business continuity plan.

When can BIP services be invoked?

BIPs can be invoked for any incident that interrupts normal use of the protected systems – no exceptions.

BIPs Technical Engineers are available to respond to invocations of the service 24/7. A simple telephone call to Capital Continuity and within 15 minutes the failed system will be rebuilt and ready for use.