Stratus offers a disaster recovery package for public sector
Stratus Technologies today announced that it is offering a disaster recovery and business continuity managed services package to public sector organisations
Stratus is linking its extensive experience in continuous availability to an innovative services model that allows public sector organisations to reduce their capital and operating expenditure around business continuity. This new approach allows organisations that deal with life-threatening situations, such as police forces and ambulance and fire services, to get the highest levels of protection against downtime.
Business continuity and disaster recovery planning within public sector organizations has continued to be a key concern since the introduction of the Civil Contingencies Act (2004). This means a proactive approach to business continuity has to be implemented by Category One responders such as local councils, police, fire authorities, ambulance, environmental agencies and the coastguard in order to protect their applications and ensure they can deliver critical services in the event of an emergency. Stratus' Managed Services approach allows these organisations to handle risk and continuity planning as part of their overall business strategies.
"The Civil Contingencies Act imposes statutory duties on all Category One responders, so there is a risk to the organisation's reputation should it fail to meet these demands," explained Graham Roberts, Stratus Solutions Services. "However, lack of compliance has both professional and personal consequences for those responsible for managing Category One responder agencies, so implementing a comprehensive business continuity strategy is vital for how these organisations plan their strategies in future."
For applications such as Command and Control environments, availability of IT resources is crucial to ensure that information is up to date and the organisation is responding to public requests quickly and efficiently. Protecting this application is therefore critical to the performance of the organisation across both normal and emergency situations.
For example, Stratus works with a number of police forces across the UK to run their Command and Control installations. Vantage, the application at the heart of these facilities allows forces to react quickly to emergency calls and provision resources to meet the needs of citizens.
"The Command and Control function is one of the most critical areas of operation within any police force; the police control room relies absolutely on the availability of this application to protect the public and the force's own officers," said Roberts. "However, value for money is also an important aspect of how the police force caters to the needs of the public. Taking the Managed Services approach to business continuity combines the best of both worlds: a cost-effective pricing strategy and lower capital outlay with the highest level of availability and fastest recovery from any incident."
Working with experienced Stratus consultants, emergency services agencies can define a set of prioritised deliverables that can be built into a customised disaster recovery solution. This approach takes into account the people, process and IT requirements of that organisation to provide the required level of protection and availability, as well as meeting any specific needs and budgets that the organisation may have.
One benefit of the Stratus approach is organisations can get the level of availability needed to ensure that service remains high while benefiting from reduced upfront expenditure. The service can pay monthly for its continuous availability, giving them the ability to forecast costs more effectively while avoiding the substantial capital investment that is often required in creating full business continuity systems.
"Listening to the client and understanding how the solution will work when it is most needed is the most important consideration for us," said Roberts. "Business continuity planning is an evolving requirement, so making sure that the underlying IT infrastructure continually meets the organisation's needs is part of the service Stratus delivers."
