When disaster strikes, you need to be fully confident that your company is prepared for anything. That could mean turning on a dime to set up your teams to work from home or other remote locations during a fire, flood, or even a national epidemic.
Microsoft has spent decades building up its business continuity readiness, planning for redundancies that support operations for every situation from an earthquake or flood to undersea cable damage. This is particularly important for organizations with compliance requirements or those in highly regulated industries where instant access to information is a vital component of their operational readiness. Being confident that your email and other office applications are always-on and continually available for your staff provides an added peace of mind for IT administrators and business leaders.
Microsoft Office 365 has been quick to recognize the increasing importance of cloud business applications. Released in 2011, MS Office 365 was primarily developed to address the growing needs of businesses that focus on productivity and communication, factors that are greatly intertwined. By making use of cloud technology, Office 365 has enabled organizations to take a step forward by allowing them a steady level of service in accordance with what customers want.
As Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft, stated, “That’s why Microsoft has set a bold ambition to reinvent productivity and business process in this mobile-first, cloud-first world.” By utilizing cloud technology Microsoft enabled businesses to do more, allowing them to provide a continuous level of service in-line with what their customers demanded.
The O365 core reliability design principles include:
- Redundancy is built into every layer: Physical redundancy (through the use of multiple disks, network cards, redundant servers, geographical sites, and datacenters); data redundancy (constant replication of data across data centers) and functional redundancy (the ability for customers to work offline when network connectivity is interrupted or inconsistent).
- Resiliency: This is achieved using active load balancing and dynamic prioritization of tasks based on current loads. There is also constant performance recovery testing across failure domains as well as exercising of both automated failover and manual switchover to healthy resources.
- Distributed functionality of component services: Component services of Office 365 are distributed across data centers and regions to help limit the scope and impact of a failure in one area and to simplify all aspects of maintenance and deployment, diagnostics, repair, and recovery.
- Continuous monitoring: Services are being actively monitored 24×7, with extensive recovery and diagnostic tools to drive automated and manual recovery of the service.
- Simplification: Managing a global, online service is complex. To drive predictability, standardized components and processes are used, wherever possible. A loose coupling among the software components results in a less complex deployment and maintenance. Lastly, a change management process that goes through progressive stages from scope to validation before being deployed worldwide helps ensure predictable behaviors.
- Human backup: Automation and technology are critical to success, but ultimately, it is people who make the most critical decisions during a failure, outage, or disaster scenario. The online services are staffed with 24/7 on-call support to provide rapid response and information collection towards problem resolution.
Data Protection in the Event of a Disruption
Cybercriminals live for disruption, looking for ways to intrude on your corporate data and resources and quickly taking action when incidents occur that might cause a break in the armor of security surrounding your organization.
With O365, you are gaining access to a wealth of additional options such as data monitoring, storage, and redundancy that will allow you to rapidly recover access to your critical information in the event of an outage. Geographically diverse data centers guard against local failures while monitoring solutions help to identify any issues that might occur in real-time. All of these solutions work together to ensure that your data is highly available as well as protected from exterior and interior forces.
Protect Business Operations with Proactive Planning
Business continuity is not only needed in the event of a disaster. Planned downtime may also require you to trigger these solutions, such as during a migration or upgrade activity or during an office move. Regardless of the situation, when it’s imperative to retain operations, you need to know that your Microsoft Office 365 business continuity solution is in place and tested to perform exactly as expected. Good thing you can rely on 6x Gold Microsoft Partner ClinkIT Solutions to help you address business continuity concerns within your enterprise.
