NTT Europe Online - Case Studies - Business Continuity

Directly affecting revenue generating capabilities, as well as threatening brand and credibility, online businesses are particularly susceptible to down-time as it . Bob Welton, Sales Director for NTT Europe Online in the UK, has consulted with many clients about the most appropriate business continuity solutions.

“Businesses online need to guarantee a level of availability and reliability that is commensurate with the level of risk they are willing to accept”, explains Welton.

“There are many threats to availability: security incidents and disasters grab the most headlines but undeniably the most common problems are due to human error which can be something as simple as installing a patch directly to a live environment without testing it first.  If the patch fails, this can affect site availability until the previous version is restored."

“The simplest solution to these problems is to implement strict development procedures and version control across different environments for the live and testing systems.”

“Other availability problems can occur when the customer’s company is involved in a newsworthy event, whether that be a major product launch or an announcement of a forthcoming merger or acquisition, for example. Traffic spikes occur and affect availability.”

“NTT Europe Online can, of course, help in many respects here; we have experience of dealing with huge international events such as Euro 2004 as well as large scale national projects such as the launch of Virgin Mobile in France.”

“Finally, disasters. They do happen, unfortunately. Some are dramatic incidents, others more of an everyday nuisance. NTT Europe Online’s ISO27001 Business Continuity Plan enables us to ensure our own company stays up and running during such disasters, but customers are increasingly looking at their own plans. Those that have critical systems are investing in additonal redundancy, high availability systems and globally load balanced hosting infrastructures, where the production environment may be in London, for example, with a mirrored back up facility in another city entirely such as Frankfurt, Paris or Madrid.”

“Of course all this is dependent on cost constraints, but some customers invest so much value in their brand and are so reliant on the system to generate revenue that investing in equipment for redundancy or for a separate test environment is worth the money.  For them, the investment allows them to continue operating with greater availability and, further, it protects their brand and business credibility online.”