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Slide 1: Business Continuity Planning – Balancing Risk and Scalability Business disruptions can be in any form from minor events to extreme disasters, they all have the potential to prevent employees from getting to their place of work. It can also be an application or a site being down. Businesses today are relying highly on real-time access to information for their business processes and applications. Any kind of disruption can have repercussions on business from loss of credibility and business reputation and related loss of revenue. Hence they need to have a disaster recovery plan in place that ensures people can get access to information, with minimal disruption to business processes, allow your employees to continue to work remotely from any location, that your business partners or suppliers gain uninterrupted access to important information. Thus to deal with these disruptions, businesses need to have a detailed remote access strategy and business continuity planning (BCP) that can easily be transitioned to deal with emergency situations should be considered to avoid loss of productivity or revenue. According to Gartner analyst John Girard, “The most critical success factor to any business continuity plan is fast re-establishment of business processes. However, if your disaster recovery plans do not include Remote Desktop Access coordination steps, no amount of cool technology will save your operations.” Traditionally IPSec VPN remote access solutions were used to provide secure access to applications. You need to assess the criticality of your business processes and technologies and develop business continuity VPN and disaster-recovery plans using automated workflow for testing and approval. Emerging new technologies solve the cost, complexity and predictability problems; as all you need to support this type of access is a PC, laptop, PDA, or cell phone that has an Internet browser installed. Regulatory compliance and government mandates organizations to ensure access to key information, even during unforeseen events. Mandates like Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and others remain in effect, even if an organization is working under less than ideal conditions. Thus for business continuity planning, many vendors will claim to have the best solution. To get alwayson access to applications and resources for business continuity planning, a remote access solution must satisfy certain deployment criteria: • Secure anytime, anywhere access • Uninterrupted business continuity • Maximum performance • Automated VPN provisioning
Slide 2: • Cost-effectiveness • Global redundancy Thus businesses can take a proactive approach to their business continuity planning by planning ahead of time, with clear processes and responsibilities. A critical component of the overall business continuity plan is a secure remote access plan to ensure that remote workers can continue their work during and after a disaster strikes. Also read on - Application Security, SSL VPN Appliances