Enterprises, regardless of size, understand the need of their customers for their services to be always available. Businesses cannot afford long hours and days of downtime. Telecommunications firm Globe Telecom realizes the effect a service disruption can bring to their company. Over the years, text messaging and data access via mobile devices have greatly expanded in the country, and as a result, enterprises and individuals have become accustomed to having telecommunication lines up and running 24/7. "Threats to our critical resources such as people, premises, and technology could result in severe business disruption," says Globe Telecom head for Infrastructure Services and Operations Division, Edwin Soliman. To avoid these, a company should start with an agile data center. "You have to make sure that the data center has the proper tiering," Globe Telecom chief information officer Henry Rhoel Aguda points out. The company uses tiering to classify applications from the most to the least critical, providing various needed services to individuals in the process. Applications that have commercial implications are given a Tier 1 priority. "If those applications go down, you lose money," says Aguda.

VENDORS TO THE RESCUE

Since disruptions may vary from case to case, having a business continuity plan (BCP) is a must for every company. These plans differ in only two key points: when the BCP is needed and what specific features will fit the profile of a particular company. Tria notes that "any company that values their business and the service they provide to their end-users will benefit from having a business continuity plan."

Long-time telecommunications player, PLDT, through its VITRO Data Center, offers basic business continuity solutions in three forms, all geared towards making sure that the customer gets exactly what they need, when they need it. "The most basic solution we provide are disaster recovery seats with a server rack similar to what is set up at the client's primary site," says Tria. The telecommunications giant has developed packaged solutions for business continuity, in a way tailor-fitting BCPs for their clients. They have a package where they provide the space for the servers and the cold shell for the BCP seats. Under another package, they offer all the hardware and software solutions to complete the whole BCP set-up on an amortized arrangement.

Meanwhile, international player, Hewlett- Packard, gives special focus on storage and backup with their HP D2D Backup Systems which is powered by their HP StoreOnce data deduplication. With D2D Backup Systems with HP StoreOnce data deduplication, client companies are able to store more data because of the system's 20:1 ratio where they can backup their data on a 20TB storage while taking only 1TB. They can also discard duplicated data via the StoreOnce feature. "Data Deduplication is a common data reduction technique where only unique data blocks consume space on disks," says Hewlett-Packard Philippines product manager for HP Storage and Enterprise Business, Charles Patrick Ty. "This process eliminates duplicated date blocks, ensuring that data is only written once, hence the name StoreOnce." Fast backing-up of data and elimination of duplicated data works well when a company is upgrading its system or has a lot of data to manage. "Being able to store more on disk allows customers to have higher data retention policies on fast disk for quick and easy recovery," Ty points out. "And since only unique blocks are being written to disk, HP's StoreOnce Data deduplication enables our customers to do low bandwidth replication across sites." Software provider Symantec also puts importance on growing data within enterprises today as it has evolved integrated backup solutions. "Backup is a critical part of an organization's protection strategy," says Symantec Philippines senior country manager, Luichi Robles.