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Business resilience is a something that everyone knows the importance of, but most organisations fail to see its value until it's too late. However, as the digital landscape continues to evolve, it has become incredibly dangerous and foolhardy at best to maintain this mindset.

Migrating everything to the cloud and making it somebody else's problem is not the silver bullet that many believed it to be either. Earlier this year even Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered an outage that closed the websites for businesses of all sizes.

The unavailability of tools such as Trello, Slack, Adobe Cloud and Grammarly crippled the creative industry during the widespread outage. Equally, even Microsoft's Office 365 recently left European users unable to access Exchange Online leaving many unable to access their email accounts. Meanwhile, security breaches at Equifax have left their reputation in tatters.

These are just a few examples of high-profile incidents that have highlighted how any business can go offline and become invisible to their customers at any moment in time. In a world of endless options, fickle users will then visit your competitor. These are the inconvenient truths that businesses are facing and why reputation is increasingly topping the list of business priorities.

The problems of having an always online business are well documented. But how to achieve the elusive business resiliency and disaster recovery strategy is a topic that often leaves more questions than answers.

However, to prepare for the unexpected and the inevitable impact on your business to ensure that all IT services are up and running within minutes is much easier than you might think. The days of needing expensive secondary data centres, duplicate IT equipment and lengthy wait periods interrupting your operations and impacting your business are thankfully behind us.

Understanding that business continuity is critical to your commercial survival is the first step that will set your organisation on the road to stability. With SecondSite, we provide an affordable real-time replication solution that will seamlessly integrate into your disaster recovery plan.

Rather than having one single point of failure, we replicate your virtualised IT environment into Zettagrid’s cloud and do the heavy lifting for you. Failing over to a different zone takes away the risk and ensures that all services remain online until your primary site recovers.

The most attractive feature for IT departments is that users will be blissfully unaware that you have failed over into the cloud. Rather than wasting time managing communications or appeasing key stakeholders with regular updates, IT can concentrate on resolving the issues at hand while its business as usual for everyone else.

Although many organisations already have a disaster recovery plan, recovering from a backup is traditionally a painful and time-consuming process. In an always-online economy, businesses no longer have the luxury of going offline in a world where time is the new currency.

Ensuring that data synchronisation, accessibility, and a recovery site is in place for your virtual environment is the new belts and braces approach required to increase the availability of all services and applications. But, there is much more to achieving business resiliency than having a virtual get out of jail free card when disaster strikes.

Ensuring that you can determine and communicate compliance across your company, boardroom or even auditors is equally as important. Regular reports that highlight exactly what information and applications are always available is one of the most important aspects of achieving high availability and amazing business resiliency.

A neglected recovery plan that is tested or revisited every few years has never been an effective strategy. Equally having all your eggs in one basket whether it be in-house or cloud only is also a recipe for disaster.

The secret sauce to effective business resilience is having the ability to deploy, test and recover faster when the inevitable happens. It is imperative that any real-time disaster recovery replication solution should replicate into multiple zones to avoid going offline in an always-online digital world.

It has become crucial to understand the costs and implications of downtime during an outage. We understand that the top of businesses wish lists will be a scalable and quick disaster recovery solution that is both reliable and affordable for organisations of any size.

Can you say with confidence that your operations will be free from interruption for the foreseeable future? Is your organisation's productivity and reputation safe from harm? And are you prepared for a disaster?

Zettagrid’s award-winning SecondSite is bringing much-needed innovation to the disaster recovery space to efficiently deliver organisational resilience. But what are your experiences and insights in this area? We would love to have a conversation to understand what challenges your business is facing and how we can help you overcome them.

Find out more information about SecondSite by visiting the Zettagrid website.