Business continuity and disaster prevention are two critical areas of the business that often requires a disaster to get into motion. Considering that data is the lifeblood of any organisation, ensuring that a company has the required services in place should be a top priority and should form part of the boardroom discussion rather than just a pure IT function. This is the view of Jacques Rautenbach, Chief Strategy Officer for Emerging Markets at IS.

 

“Ensuring that you have the correct business continuity solutions in place is absolutely critical, particularly on the African continent,” says Rautenbach. Natural disasters such as earthquakes, acts of terrorism and many other risks have the potential of crippling an organisation without the necessary business continuity processes. “More and more organisations are starting to realise that this function cannot be the sole responsibility of an IT manager, but should be discussed at boardroom level to ensure that adequate measures are in place to protect shareholder value while complying with an increasing amount of legislation.”

 

“Data protection is a critical component of ensuring the sustainability of any organisation,” says Rautenbach. “Equally important is having access to that data as and when it is =required.” The challenge that many organisations face is that backup and recovery is seen as an administrative function rather than a specialised function which means that it does not necessarily get the attention it deserves. “You often find, especially with smaller organisations, that backups are made and hosted off-site as required, but that when this data is required, it is not accessible.”

There is also increased focus on data integrity as part of business continuity. “Although this has been said time and time again, your employees remain one of your biggest threats when it comes to data integrity,” says Rautenbach. “Whether it is a disgruntled employee tampering with data or just an innocent mistake, companies are increasingly moving their data into the cloud to protect against in-house anomalies.”

 

Internet Solutions partners with clients to provide a secure solution to business continuity. “Using Attix5, business critical data is protected by providing a secure automated centralised repository for data stored in country and internationally, while minimising the impact on resources,” says Rautenbach. “And while data is centrally stored, it is available i

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