Disaster Recovery

Ensuring successful disaster recovery.

The recent plethora of natural disasters, terrorists attacks, and disease outbreaks have left many companies questioning the state of their disaster recovery plans.

If disaster strikes and employees can not work from the office, a company must be equipped for employees to work from home. As disaster recovery plans are implemented, a secure, remote access solution, such as an SSL VPN, play a vital part in any successful disaster recovery infrastructure.

The most critical success factor to any business continuity plan is a fast re-establishment of business processes. However, if your disaster recovery plans do not include remote access coordination steps, no amount of cool technology will save your operations, With an SSL VPN enterprises can immediately provide all employees, partners, or contractors access to network resources from any device or network environment. Since SSL VPNs provide clientless access, no special software is needed, and users do not need a managed device to gain access. This is important, since during a business disruption, users will likely be accessing from a home PC, mobile device, or other unmanaged system.

We expanded our disaster recovery infrastructure during the SARS incident a couple of years ago, and we continue to be prepared for any potential business disruption by maintaining a redundant, flexible network environment. SSL VPN plays a critical role in our disaster recovery initiative, as it assures that all employees and other users can access resources from any device and internet connection.”

A remote access solution should adhere to these key business requirements for a successful disaster recovery initiative:

Easy to deploy - all users should be able to access the VPN from the company web site or other URL everyone knows.

Quickly scalable - the IT staff must be able to scale the remote access quickly to accommodate a spike in VPN traffic.

Access to all applications - users must be able to access all network resources, including web-based, file shares, client/server, Windows Terminal Services, etc. A solution that supports Web conferencing and VoIP is also important during an emergency, since traditional phone systems may not be working.

Highest level of security - keeping business as usual should not be at the expense of privacy or security. With an SSL VPN, enterprises can closely control who accesses what information and block unauthorised access.

Ensure compliance - regulatory compliance does not end during a disaster. An SSL VPN ensures only authorised users can access resources and provides auditing and reporting of that access.