Blackhawk Technology Consulting LLC

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Solutions

Blackhawk Technology Consulting LLC’s services and solutions offerings are designed to help your IT organization at any IT life-cycle or stage; from gathering business and technical requirements and specifications, to custom development, all the way through the integration cycle with existing business systems and processes. The Blackhawk Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Solutions are outlined below.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity: Can you really survive without it?

Hurricane Katrina, the Los Angeles/Northridge earthquake in 1994 and floods, all natural disasters. These natural disasters can devastate states, cities, communities and the businesses and services which keep these communities together. Studies show that more than 25% of businesses which have been damaged by these natural disasters never recover.

Even if you have planned for a natural disaster, there are endless man-made disasters which can occur. During 9/11, a major data center in New York was taken down by the terrorist’s attacks, leaving hundreds of businesses without access to their online ecommerce applications. All of the businesses which were linked to this data center came to a screaming stop; the business failed their customers because they did not have a comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plan.

That could never happen to me or my business. We don’t even live in a high tornado, earthquake or hurricane zone, we will be fine. Thos types of excuses simply will not do anymore. If you have never run any actual tests, how can you tell if you and your business are ready? A large number of companies who have run actual simulations have discovered that their DR and BC plans were brutally lacking. Where will your staff be located? How will they access critical information if all of your equipment and information resources have been destroyed, will you have systems and information resources in place to continue receiving orders or requests?

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity: What do the statistics say?

Disasters, crisis and emergencies are often unforeseen eventualities which can occur at any time and in any form, leaving behind a far reaching impact on an organization. How can you ensure that your businesses operations are uninterrupted and protected from all of these unforeseen eventualities? The following statistics should bring to light what a disaster can do and why it is so crucial to have a DR and BC plan in place.

From the above statistics, your business cannot afford to be without a strong and reliable DR and BC plan. The Blackhawk Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Services and Solutions can help your business in building a better prevention mechanism and maximizing the flexibility of your business operations against any disaster or emergency. Our proven solution will significantly reduce the overall impact of any disasters on your organization. Our DR and BC services and solutions comprehensively address various forms of prevention and recovery methodologies and strategies. We can provide your business with a cost-effective solution on the measurements of Return on Investment (ROI) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Using Virtualization for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

The viability and promise of virtualization for servers, storage and applications is no longer disputed because of its strong benefits, including a greater flexibility to respond to business needs and changes, reduced costs, and an improved service level. Early adopters of virtualization have also focused on virtualization as a means of reducing costs through consolidation and containment. As customer comfort levels increase and the offerings from vendors like VMware, Citrix Xenserver, Virtual Iron, Thinstall, Microsoft Softricity and DataCore mature, businesses will implement virtualization across a wider array of environments to gain important benefits such as business continuity.

Similar to physical environments, virtual environments require a level of management in order to protect resources and data and mitigate risk. Not broadly understood in the debate about the risks of virtualization is the extraordinary value virtualization can provide from a business continuity/disaster recovery perspective. According to IDC's Virtualization Maturity Index, organizations are just starting to leverage the technology in a proactive manner and reaping higher than expected total cost of ownership savings in this area.

The majority of businesses today acknowledge the importance of business continuity and availability (BC&A) to their success. Four out of five (79%) respondents in a recent HP survey on the topic reported that BC&A will be a higher corporate, with disaster recovery being the top focus area. Among the top five drivers of BC&A spending are lowering operational /IT costs, competitive pressure, and business change, indicating acceptance of the role of BC&A in delivering business outcomes.

In the past, the highest level of disaster recovery protection has been achieved by physically duplicating everything in the data center at a separate location. This "copy" of the data center would sit dormant until there was a failure at the primary site. While highly effective, this active/spare site approach is costly and difficult to justify from a return-on-investment standpoint, especially for smaller organizations.

Virtualization, when combined with the right management tools, provides a compelling alternative. Because it separates applications from the physical layer and allows for the sharing of computing resources, even in a multi-operating system environment, virtualization enables organizations to set up two sites which both run in active mode. This provides value to the business on a day-to-day basis, with each site able to take on the mission-critical workloads of the other in the event of an outage or disaster.

The Blackhawk Difference

Don’t let a natural disaster, intentional or unintentional disaster or electrical failure bring your business down, discover today how Blackhawk Technology Consulting LLC can help your business:

Blackhawk Technology Consulting LLC can help you and your business consider the possibilities and plan for the unexpected. Through our time-tested processes and procedures, we can guide you in implementing an ongoing, sensible and cost-effective DR and BC plan. We will guide and show you how you can have your business up and running in a matter of minutes, hours or even days.

DR and BC From Our Partners: Don’t take our word for it

When the Collier County School District in Florida needed a strong and reliable Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity solution for their data center, they went with VMware. With VMMotion they were able to move around servers when one or more failed, with DRS they were able to monitor and react when a server or a group of servers went down and with HA they were able to keep mission critical servers up when doing maintenance.

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Kane County Illinois choose VMware to meet their DR and BC plan. In a county government setting IT is expected to keep mission critical servers running at all times for departments such as health care, law enforcement and emergency services. In a time of crisis it is imperative that mission critical servers remain online and available. Kane County met their DR and BC requirements with VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 and leveraging VMotion to migrate mission critical servers to backups in time of crisis, DRS to monitor and inform when a mission critical server went down due to a crisis and HA to keep mission critical servers up while maintenance was being performed.

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Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine goes to VMware to meet their DR and BC requirements. Prior to implementing VMware to meet DR and BC requirements, the college had no viable DR and BC plan. Individual servers were backed up to tape, which was then stored in another building on campus. Today, Bowdoin College and Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, have formed a business partnership to inexpensively provide an enterprise-class cross-country disaster recovery and business continuity solution using VMware Infrastructure 3.

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For more information about the Blackhawk DR and BC Solutions, please click the link below and you will be redirected to the Blackhawk DR and BC Solutions Datasheet. To have one of our consultants contact you, please click on the Online Request Form link.

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