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Overview
CH2M HILL Managed Services designs and implements full disaster recovery and business continuity solutions, with a focus to provide the infrastructure necessary for businesses to restore their critical IT systems and processes after a disaster.
Highlights
• CH2M HILL Managed Services identifies critical business processes and systems and sets priorities for recovering the most important first
• Continuous availability of critical data and applications with a recovery time of zero
• Infrastructure availability including office space, phone, fax and computer
• Expert disaster recovery staffing available for restored resources
• Full suite of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity services that can be customized to recover IT systems, processes and people
Along with core data restoration, CH2M HILL Managed Services offers business continuity and infrastructure support including phone, fax and computer – allowing 24 hour turnaround for full business restoration.
IT experts are available to staff restored services utilizing pre-existing facilities and infrastructure so an organization’s operation can resume even if offices cannot.
Business Continuity
The best time to respond to a disaster is before it happens. Waiting for a disaster to happen is no longer an acceptable business strategy. The benefit of business continuity planning is the focus on what it takes to keep the business operating. Business continuity involves identifying and prioritizing the most critical business processes and how to recover them quickly. This generally requires assigning monetary values to specific business processes and an alignment with an appropriate level of disaster recovery service.
Disaster Recovery
Many organizations have more than one disaster recovery strategy in place because different business processes have different costs and service level agreements. For many organizations, the availability of a low-cost, managed disaster recovery facility enables a recovery site strategy without the associated costs of a dedicated secondary site and operational expenses.
CH2M Hill Managed Services offers a range of disaster recovery and business continuity managed services customized to cost-effectively meet the individual requirements of organizations. While there are many disaster recovery models offered commercially, they generally fall into three categories: hot sites, warm sites and cold sites.
Hot Site
The Hot Site model is ideally suited for companies with real-time transaction systems and applications which are critical to business operations. Every minute of downtime costs money when these systems and applications are not available. In the Hot Site environment, CH2M HILL Managed Services maintains a “live” duplicate of a company’s data center infrastructure. Data is synchronized in real time between the customer’s production systems and CH2M HILL’s clustered high-availability servers.
In the event of an incident, the customer has continuous availability of applications and data with an objective of zero recovery time.
Warm Site
The Warm Site model appeals to companies whose computer use is high, but is not a transaction-based business and whose systems can be restored between four and twenty-four hours. The Warm Site is a range of managed services that are customized to meet the individual budgetary requirements and service level needs of customers. The highest level of Warm Site service offers a periodic replication between the customer’s data center and CH2M HILL’s data center, providing a 12-hour recovery window. The CH2M HILL data center guarantees standby availability for all networking and server components necessary to perform a full recovery of organization’s critical IT services.
Another scenario for Warm Site disaster recovery is where the customer does periodic tape backups on critical systems and applications and manages the tape storage themselves. In the event of a disaster, the customer brings their tapes to a CH2M HILL data center for recovery on standby communication and server equipment that is provisioned under a CH2M managed service agreement.
Cold Site
This model focuses on companies whose data is not viewed as absolute for daily operations. Following a disaster, CH2M HILL Managed Services provides the company with all the network communications and server infrastructure at one of CH2M HILL’s data centers. Data and applications are accessible on the new system within two to four days. Cold Sites are the most cost-effective.
How To Decide on Which Service
The optimal disaster recovery plan for an organization will be a function of an organization’s resources and the prioritization of critical processes and the supporting IT infrastructure. CH2M HILL Managed Services’
experts are available to help customers decide between hot, warm and cold services.
Business continuity planning exposes two vital signs of an organization’s disaster strategy: Real Time Objective (RTO) and Real Point Objective (RPO). RTO shows how long a business can survive without certain IT functions. RPO shows how much data the organization can credibility lose or recreate after recovery. The less forgiving the RPO and the faster the RTO, the more comprehensive the recovery center will need to be.
The key benefit of CH2M HILL Managed Services for disaster recovery and business continuity is flexibility. Organizations are not static, so having on-demand capabilities makes budgeting for disaster recovery and business continuity services easier, and less costly.
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