IT Infrastructure Resiliency, Recoverability & Continuous Improvement, CPS-230 assessments and remediation

Are you comfortable that your business will adequately manage and recover from an unplanned outage of important IT infrastructure without adverse business impact?

Are you comfortable that your IT infrastructure is built with resilience and recoverability in mind? If you have APRA regulatory requirements to meet, are you meeting FAR / CPS 230?

Are you comfortable that your IT is protected from external threats ?

If you answered NO to any of these questions, we can help

Initial Assessments under $20k

Call David Now on +61 438569822

SERVICES

What We Do

Disaster Recovery Assessments / Get your DRP working properly

Do you know what your critical application Recovery Time Objective (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) are ?
How good is your Disaster Recovery Plan, particularly for your most critical applications?
How long does it take you to fail-over to DR ? Can you fail back ?
Can you run BAU operations from DR then keep the data when you fail back ?
How efficient are your runbooks ?
Do you have a Master DR Plan and a DR Plan for each application ?
Is your DR aligned to your Business Continuity Plan ?
When did you last run a complete test, including running Prod from the DR site ? Was it successful ?

If you don’t have a good answer for these questions, you probably need to review the current state and put in some plans to fix.

IT Infrastructure Resilience & Recoverability:

IT Infrastructure Resilience:

Assessment includes:

- Infrastructure design, build and configuration characteristics
- Alignment with RTOs and RPOs for business-critical applications
- Operational practices and processes

IT Infrastructure Recoverability:

Assessment includes:

- Disaster Recovery plans, alignment to RTOs and RPOs
- Infrastructure second-site and ability to failover to it then fail back)
- Validity of tests to real DR scenario.

Method:

- Interviews, workshops
- Deep dives as required
- Review documentation
- Comparison with industry best practices (e.g. Essential 8, ITIL, Uptime Institute TIA 942 etc)
- Written report and presentation (after internal review to ensure the work is seen as internally driven)

FAR / CPS 230 Assessments and Remediation

APRA regulated entities must be resilient to operational risks and disruptions.
These companies must effectively manage operational risks, maintain their critical operations through disruptions and manage service providers’ similar risks
In addition to a risk management framework, which most large organisations will have, operational risk profiles must be assessed and operational resilience in place

If you need help here, we can help with things such as:

Operational Resilience assessment including:
- Alignment of IT Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) to Business Continuity Plan (BCP) including BCP improvements ensuring business critical operations are captured
- DRP assessment and improvement
- Operational resilience of primary infrastructure including recoverability assessment (to avoid the need to invoke the DRP)
- ‘Disaster Avoidance’ strategies (e.g. removing single points of failure, implementing highly-available infrastructure)
Implementation of gaps identified
Preparation and execution of DRP runbooks to fail over to the secondary site and fail back to the primary site

IT Operations effectiveness

Is your Production infrastructure resilient ?
What is your IT backup strategy? Are restores regularly tested?
How effective are your Service Management processes ? Are they linked ? Do you have an effective CMDB ?
Is your Change Management process truly set up to protect the business from unauthorised, untested and poor quality changes that may not have backout plans ?

If the answer to any of these questions concern you, get us in to take a look.

We can assess the current state of your operations department in days not weeks and quickly compile an improvement plan that will result in less downtime, faster recovery and a better service for your customers

IT Infrastructure Programs and Projects

Are you running old hardware or operating systems ? Does your technology need a refresh ?

Have you considered the risk of running on unsupported infrastructure ?

We can help by running large or small infrastructure projects or be rescuing failing projects

Our consultants are all PMBOK certified and we diligently manage the following key components:

Scope, Change, Cost and Schedule management
Risks and Issues
Stakeholder engagement
Change Management (project execution changes)
Formal and informal reporting (e.g. Steering Committees, Risk & Issue status, Review Meetings, Postcards etc)

We have skin in the game, commit to deliver and are happy to consider a no success = no fee commercial model

Cloud Services

Looking to migrate to the cloud ? There are opportunities and minefields galore. Let us help you navigate the journey.

We will look at:

the applications in scope, look at how receptive they are to migrating to the cloud
constraints (e.g. software licensing, operating system compatibility etc)
the 5Rs and, with your Solution Architects, determnine the best landing zone per application (e.g. lift and shift, re-factor, re-platform etc)
Compliance considerations
High Availability / Disaster Recovery/Avoidance design
the costs to migrate and run in BAU and whether the business case stacks up

Data Centre Migrations & Relocations

If you are running a data centre migration, relocation or consolidation, we have a team of experts available to execute the program at the lowest risk and lowest cost

Our approach is to approach via a risk vs reward paradigm. There are some elements that are simply too high risk to consider options (e.g. the network and storage infrastructure must be in place at the target data centre and, ideally, no IP address changes are required). We also look at horses for courses in that migration solutions will differ according to the technology stack (e.g. a database environment would be migrated differently to an applications server).

We have learnt lessons from all previous projects and will apply them to your project to ensure the lowest risk and lowest cost, as we will get it right the first time

Data Centre Site Assessments

How resilient is your data centre ?

Are power and cooling truly redundant ?
Are your hot and cold aisles configured correctly ?
When did you last test the UPS ? How old are the batteries ?
How often do you switch to generator power ?
How often is generator fuel cycled/changed ?
Do all racks have dual power feeds ?
Does each server in a rack have redundant power?
Do you have enough a/c to cater for a loss of 2 units ?
Are the a/c cooling towers regularly maintained ?
How many single points of failure do you have ?

You may be unpleasantly surprised at some of the answers.

Let us run a site assessment as a first step to addressing these risks

Approach

Professional IT Services & Technology Consulting

We can help you deliver the outcome you are looking for quickly, with no fuss and cost-effectvely. No need to hire contractors who may or may not deliver. Our pricing includes options for no payment until successful project completion meaning we have skin in the game and a genuine stake in achieving your outcome.

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