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Helping your clients cope with wildfire

 business continuity strategy best practices

Your clients need to plan differently for wildfire threat.

Because wildfires can occur with little or no warning and overwhelm a given location extremely quickly.

Because they can continue for weeks or even months and produce impacts — notably smoke and post-fire floods and mudslides — in areas not immediately affected by the flames.

And because wildfires, unlike other natural disasters, can be started by people, making wildfire risks uncontrollable.

When evacuation is the only option

Beyond a few precautions (clearing brush and trimming trees near structures), not much can be done to protect a physical structure from wildfire heading its way. Evacuation can be your clients’ only option.

But evacuation to where? How can your clients achieve the sort of IT resilience they need to keep their businesses viable — even through a wildfire?

Making your clients’ IT infrastructures wildfire-ready

To be prepared , your clients need:

  • A well-crafted business continuity/disaster recovery plan that’s frequently tested , especially after any changes to their IT infrastructure, and that includes an emergency multi-channel communications system so they can contact all of their employees regardless of device or location.
  • Use of a 24/7 business resumption center that provides high-availability, scalable data center , co-location , and network operations capabilities. It also must ensure secure access to your clients’ data and application backups , customizable workspace for their employees, and professional staff to help them successfully fail over and fail back.

Combined with well-planned cloud-based disaster recovery services (such as DR as a Service ), a carefully-located 24/7 business resumption center that’s part of a global data center network ensures that your clients’ IT infrastructures and the data and applications these harbor can be moved somewhere safe whenever necessary.

Developing an IT resilience strategy

A business continuity/disaster recovery plan and access to a 24/7 business resumption center both have key roles to play in a wider IT resilience strategy that combines continuous availability, backup, disaster recovery , workload mobility, and multi-cloud agility .

This sort of IT resilience has been forged into a service platform designed around continuous data protection — including state-of-the-art replication that protects applications with all their dependencies and enables pre-configuration of workflows for fast recovery without manual intervention.

The platform also integrates orchestration/automation capabilities that support multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies, including major public cloud platforms. And the platform’s analytics/control functionality’s tightly integrated, full-featured APIs and intelligent dashboards provide complete visibility, access to live and historical analytical data, and SLA compliance — so your clients can plan, optimize, and troubleshoot across multi-site and multi-cloud environments.

An experienced business continuity/disaster recovery services provider can work with you and your clients to develop a customized IT resilience plan able to keep your clients’ businesses operational — even in the face of wildfire.

Meet the Author
Adam Burke is Quest's Vice President of Sales and Partnerships.
Contact Quest Today  ˄
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