Business continuity a priority

Seventy-six percent of IT executives in London see business continuity as a priority, according to a recent survey conducted by AT&T, reports Webit PR.

Some of the key findings show that more than 83% of the executives interviewed indicated that their company has a business plan in place, and 72% of companies have had these plans updated in the past 12 months.

The results also show that business continuity planning has been a priority for 46% of the companies interviewed, and 30% said that business continuity planning has become a priority in recent years because of natural disasters, security and terrorist threats.

According to a survey conducted by Symantec, data centre environments are becoming more complex with the increase of virtual machines, servers, applications, storage and multiplicity of operating systems, reports eChannelLine.

However, 99% of respondents are implementing ITIL/ITSM frameworks to standardise the various elements of the data centre, stated Matt Fairbanks, the senior director of product marketing at Symantec.

"People are moving towards these ITIL and ITSM frameworks and methodologies to give that common vocabulary and bring [IT] down to digestible chunks."

Business continuity and disaster recovery planning is a major area of interest because of the impact of disasters - both small-scale and large. Remote access to company applications via SSL VPN can help companies be more resilient and can be a good part of a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, reports SecurityPark.

AEP Networks has announced the AEP Netilla Security Platform (NSP) Release 5.6 - its SSL VPN that includes integrated load-balancing to provide geographical site fail-over for business continuity.

In the NSP Release 5.6, the standard load-balancing configurations now enable geographical load balancing, providing load sharing and fail-over between independent NSP clusters in geographically diverse data centres.