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Business continuity
Contingency planning, disaster recovery & business continuity are critical issues that all businesses must consider.
In 1960's, 1970's & 1980's, contingency plans allowed for weeks, then days for recovery. In the 1990's we saw that shrink to hours - and that may not be good enough in 2000's.
Instances - natural and man-made have brought home the reality the massive hemorrhaging businesses suffer with outages occur. NIST has developed a comprehensive set of guidelines for contingency planning.
DARPA designed the Internet to work under catastrophic conditions that could occur in the event of a nuclear war. Internet provides a continuous, reliable, fault-tolerant, highly distributed, and scalable environment which provides for optimal contingency when clubbed with existing remote data storage.
There are numerous methods of contingency planning and most are tailored for specific needs. Most of these disaster recovery solutions are expensive to deploy and generally tailored for the larger enterprise.
SpeechDesk's Tandem platform provides assured, secure, automatic, efficient and affordable means to recover in the event of disruption or impairment. Tandem's disaster recovery has been incorporated in the core design to be an automatic process and does not need extra configurations, other than it being included on your contingency plan. Where desired, the disaster recovery functions can be customized to suit your business process.
When you deploy Tandem the inherent "always aware" feature is awakened automatically when existing connections get severed.
To backtrack a little; Tandem is client-server architecture with the Tandem server actively polling for the Tandem client. In the event of a server failure the polling gets severed, the backup server is "awakened" and polls the client from a new IP address, thus telling the client it has moved location and directing the Tandem client to communicate with the recently awakened Tandem server. This creates a "recovery framework" where you can access most of your data and some - if not all - your business applications.
Tandem allows for plugging in other applications, and with its file-sharing capability, Tandem can help retrieve most any information from the backup server, allowing for business continuity; this instantly re-establishes text, voice and video communications with employees. You can then confer on Tandem and plan recovery and continuity. You can use your Tandem to broadcast emails, SMS messages to all your customers cell phones or to their AOL, MSN & Yahoo Messengers.
We strongly recommend you read this NIST document. |
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