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Just over a week ago, my little girl who was due on 27th February arrived early on the 18th of December, making her 10 weeks early! It was an absolute whirlwind and completely unexpected. After spending some time in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at GCUH, I became fascinated with the technical aspects and the process and procedural nature of the great work they are doing here. At every stage there is redundancy and capacity to cope with the unexpected, and backup power, systems, equipment, and people across the board. Double and triple checks at each point ensure that when dealing with the most critical aspect (in this case, babies in need of life-saving care) of an organisation nothing is missed, nothing is unexpected, and everything has a purpose.
Why Have a Redundancy Plan
The destructive storms sweeping through the Gold Coast over the Christmas holidays have greatly impacted the region’s essential services like power and internet, highlighting the critical necessity for redundancy. Furthermore, the recent Optus outage has drawn attention to the vulnerability of large organisations and its stakeholders when such an event occurs.
So how does this affect your organisation? What are your critical systems? For most of our clients, the lifeblood of their organisation is heavily reliant on technology and internet connectivity. For the modern business, being without power and communications is almost a guarantee to cease productivity.
What to Include in a Redundancy Plan
The basics that we recommend to every client is a backup connectivity solution, such as a mobile broadband service or Low Earth Orbit (LEO) service such as Starlink from a different provider to their primary connection. This will ensure an NBN outage or carrier outage (e.g. Optus) won’t bring down their operations. On-premises services and networking equipment should have a UPS to ensure power can continue in the event of brownouts, and for some of our clients running critical local workloads ensuring the UPS can keep things running while generators are started and can take over.
Procedures and people are also critical. In any good Business Continuity Plan, who, what, and when are key elements to ensure that your team know what to do to ensure redundancy in operations. Additionally, ongoing testing of these processes, systems, equipment and procedures to ensure they are ready to go in the event they are needed.
Of course, what you do at your organisation will drive the requirements. Do you need to ensure life-saving equipment is kept online at all costs? Or is a day of no internet not a major concern to you? There is no one size fits all, so it’s important to recognise, plan and test.
Are you prepared? Are you confident in your organisation’s redundancies? Contact us to learn more about your options
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