Reaping the rewards of disaster recovery and business continuity

Strengthening & securing your networks

Today's organisations have become more and more dependent on their IT systems and have come to take them for granted. It's often difficult to imagine critical data being lost, internet and email access being unavailable, call centres no longer able to receive calls or your internal network going down. Which is why the impact of the unexpected, whether some form of natural disaster or malicious damage like arson and hacking, can be particularly devastating. In a networked world damage to IT systems represents one of the most serious forms of business risk. The natural response to uncertainty may be to imagine that the worst will never happen; but that doesn't mean it won't and that it won't have an impact on your organisation's bottom line.

The odds against catastrophes happening can be stacked in your favour by mirroring data centres, running redundant networks to provide alternative transmission paths and ensuring all software is regularly updated and the most recent patches installed. Mixing fixed and wireless networks adds to your protection and ability to recover fast. Managed Firewall and IPSec VPN functionality of the kind offered by our Managed Security Service suite can help protect you from hacking and viruses.

Whether you do it yourself or outsource to a specialist, data must be routinely, automatically and remotely backed-up and, according to best practice, held in secure off-site data centres. Depending on the volume of traffic and the speed at which you need to complete the back-up, you can opt for Ethernet links between offices and data centres. Using Ethernet to connect sites not only increases speed and capacity but also security.

Network security

So how do you secure your networks, ensure traffic flows are uninterrupted and only authorised people have access? How do you protect wireless networks and data from attack and ensure devices fall within your corporate security system? Are your disaster recovery plans regularly reviewed and do you back systems up routinely? Is all IP traffic encrypted? Are PINs and passwords regularly changed along with checks to confirm who has access to what? Is equipment left on factory default settings? The questions are legion but these are only a few of the many important security issues all companies must consider.

Fortunately, help is at hand in the form of advice and sophisticated security features. Protective technologies are routinely embedded in today’s intelligent networks and additional facilities can be added to bundled packages and service agreements or included in managed services contracts. All traffic transmitted over fixed and wireless networks either within or running between buildings is protected by encryption and access controlled. Installing dedicated point-to-point IPVPNs between sites or companies can offer high levels of security.

Solutions for disaster recovery

• Ethernet solutions - Connect sites, customer databases and employees on a local, metropolitan or national Ethernet network, using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to improve network manageability, security and disaster recovery resiliency.
• Customer Contact Solutions - offer intelligent call routing, guaranteed call traffic in the event of a disaster and integration of disparate sites into a single virtual contact centre.
• Security & VPN Gateways - Our LAN solutions portfolio features powerful security and VPN Gateway offerings.
• Managed Security Services - We offer cutting edge Managed Firewall and IPSec VPN (Virtual Private Network) services to deliver robust protection for your network and data.

We can also help with your other needs; to find out more, please contact us.