By: Guy Willner, CEO at IXcellerate
In today’s globalised and ‘data-centric’ world we live, it is unreasonable to ignore possible risks. Companies are more than ever are under pressure to be aware of any possible disruption to the business that could not only be costly but fatal. As I will be discussing IBM Resilience Certification it is, only appropriate to quote IBM on its definition of resiliency: “Business resilience is the ability to rapidly adapt and respond to business disruptions and to maintain continuous business operations, be a more trusted partner, and enable growth.” Of course disruptions can affect any part of your business and all of them must be covered, however one area is more fundamental, especially to major international organisations, which is the safe running of your IT systems.
The best defense is preparation. This way costly downtime can be avoided. Technology moves and we have to keep up and move with it. The days of insourcing and keeping your IT equipment under your desk or in the spare cupboard space down the hall are far behind, as a serious organization you have already learnt that outsourcing is the future of keeping your IT side of the business protected. However as you start to dig deeper into the subject you are faced with a dilemma of who you trust and who will keep the promise of keeping your systems secure and who will not be able to keep that promise. This is exactly why IBM has carefully evaluated the important aspects of the top quality data centre and designed various resiliency levels to facilitate the choice of data centre for businesses.
The Resiliency Level Code provides an easy to understand assessment of a data centre. It was developed by IBM as an objective system for comparing the functionality of a particular data centre infrastructure and examines the facility’s ability to provide concurrent maintainability with no disruption to the service that the data centre is delivering. As an example; you would have more faith in data centre that can show you it has an IBM Resilience Level 3 certificate, than a data centre that can only give promises that it is the most secure on the market.
IBM Level 3 also serves as a guarantee for clients of the data centre with at least 99.982% availability during the worst-case disruption. Of course that does not mean that data centres have to only offer that, at IXcellerate we offer 99.999% availability and in case of any downtime our clients are financially reimbursed, but that is just something a data centre can offer as an extra security step for its clients. In reality an IBM Resilience Level 3 certificate is sufficient to prove and assure businesses that they are positioning their equipment in a secure environment.
The certification from IBM consequently tackles the barrier of entering a new market. In our case we have experienced that international companies entering Russia are accustomed to high level and westernized standards of data centre. IBM Resilience Level 3 certification, re-assures that when entering a new market, companies can expect the same high level of service, as they are familiar with. IXcellerate is a perfect example of this, offering a gateway to Europe’s largest Internet market by reassuring companies with a globally well-known prestigious certification.
Of course Business Resiliency is long journey, but giving away your IT equipment to a data centre is kind of like asking someone to look after the crown jewels, so why would you just give it to anyone? And with a data centre certified with an IBM Resilience Level 3, that long journey was just made shorter by ticking the box next to secure data storage!
