Overview

For modern businesses, any interruption of service has an impact on their ability to deliver for customers, but for small businesses, this impact can be disproportionate. Having a business continuity plan (BCP) in place can help, but it’s essential that BCP is fit for purpose, secure, cost-effective, and works when you need it most. Matching your BCP to the specific needs of your business is an essential part of right-sizing your resilience solution, but many organisations don’t have the skills, resources, or time to focus on getting this right, while also maintaining compliance with any applicable regulations. WOLK’s Managed Business Continuity-as-a-Service (MBCaaS) solution takes the complexity and uncertainty out of self-managed backups, and sets you up for success with a fully-managed resilience solution for your cloud footprint.

With the new AWS Melbourne Region, customers now have more options that ever for their disaster recovery (DR) and BCP planning. With AWS Regions in both Sydney and Melbourne, customers can now leverage both for highly available and highly resilient workloads, while keeping their data within Australia to comply with data locality and sovereignty requirements and regulations.

Resilience is a key component of business continuity, and this goes well beyond traditional considerations like backups. A mature BCP strategy needs to include considerations such as security, sandboxed backups, segregated authentication, DNS backup, and periodic recovery testing, just for a start. It also needs to include any known technical and architectural limitations, as well as ensure close alignment with your risk register. Resilience is an ongoing process, and working with a partner like WOLK allows you to offload the undifferentiated operational heavy lifting and focus on meeting your customer’s business needs. WOLK’s MBCaaS is a fully-featured managed service, and based on your needs, we can provide options to fully manage your failover and recovery, provide periodic DR and backup testing for regulatory or compliance reasons, and ongoing monitoring of availability and uptime. We can alert your teams when your workload is at risk, and work to failover your workload before it impacts your customers.

Regardless of your needs, we can work with you to determine which DR strategy makes sense for your business, and build a BCP around the right-sized solution. Whether considering a simple offsite backup to a more complex active-active architecture and everything in between, your DR strategy needs to meet your resilience requirements and be cost-effective. For example, we will optimise your BCP by identifying which resources and data should be fully pre-deployed, and which components only need to be synchronised. These decisions can dramatically impact cost and failover times, and need careful consideration.

With deep knowledge of the SMB market in Australia, WOLK are well placed to guide your business through a BCP project. We will help you navigate the available options to weigh up costs, benefits, and risk reduction. Our cost-effective managed services agreement (MSA) is always evolving to keep up with the rapid pace of cloud innovation. This means that your WOLK MBCaaS solution stays ever-relevant and continues to meet your needs from now into the future.

Common considerations in your BCP could include:

• EC2
• R53
• S3
• RDS
• Backup
• Code -build -commit -deploy
• Directory service
• EFS / FSx
• Access (IAM / SSO)
• KMS
• SES

Process

● WOLK’s team will schedule an initial consultation to understand the high level current state of your IT resources and your BC position.

● The team will then perform a Well Architected Framework Review with you, this helps us understand your business continuity needs, identify any potential risks and special considerations.

● The team creates a scope of works outlining the high level deliverables along with estimated monthly costs.

● Once the SOW has been accepted, we proceed with the project deliverables and get the BC fundamentals in place.

● With an MSA in place we maintain the integrity of the BC solution by continuously monitoring and adjusting as needed, allowing you to focus on your normal BAU activities.

Benefits

● Reduce internal operational burden associated with BC planning and upkeep.

● Comply with business requirements to meet your specific RPO and RTO targets.

● Having the knowledge that if the worst were to happen you have a proven process in place to ensure that your company can continue operating.

● Assurance that your BC environment is always up to date, monitored and maintained.

● Completely segregated environment, safe from online threats or bad actors.