28 Jul 2009
London City Airport has improved its disaster recovery planning by introducing more resilient communication links to its back office.
The airport decided to boost its voice and data set-up to help prepare operations for the event of an unexpected situation such as an aviation disaster or terrorist attack.
To that end, two ISDN lines were deployed by ntl:Telewest Business to the firm’s datacentre for voice, as well as a managed internet connection covering data.
“In the airport business you need to be prepared for anything and if something unexpected does happen, communications channels are critical,” said the IT director at London City Airport, Jason Bamforth.
“This is why network diversity is critical for our business, our passengers and the general public. With it in place, we know that the phones will keep ringing and we can keep the outside world up to date with any situation,” he said.
Business Continuity Planning and Management is driven by numerous external and internal threats which may cause some level of disruption of business activity, from infrastructure disruptions to cyber crime, natural disasters and accidents. Companies need to factor all of these into their planning process and ensure that they cover their network services, data centres and critical functions of their business in the process. People often think that external security risks such as natural disasters and terrorism are the biggest threats to their business continuity as they grab the headlines, but the most common threat actually tends to be a lack of planning and plan testing for IT failure.
Business Continuity Management and Planning is a complex series of upfront planning tasks, risk assessments related to people, facilities and systems, and on-going testing and maintaining of the plans in place. Whilst many companies have a plan in place, it is critical that they practice and maintain it on a regular basis, otherwise it will quickly go out of date. COLT recommends a phased approach to Business Continuity Management and Planning which includes seven steps from project initiation through to design and developing, testing, updating and executing in the event of a disaster.
COLT thinks that businesses need to set targets for the level of protection and recovery they need for their IT assets and infrastructure, according to the nature of their business: the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) service levels. These will then dictate the technology solutions they put in place. It could range from low end bundled database management software features to multi-million dollar hot site investments according to whether recovery needs to happen in minutes or hours.
Posted by: Andy Horn, COLT 29 Jul 2009
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