Standing on the beach

Nov 7, 2005: With bird flu looming, hurricanes highlighting businesses vulnerabilities and even the PM blustering about "specific terror threats", the need for reliable disaster recovery couldn't be more apparent.

Australian owned systems availability services provider Interactive has called upon Australian businesses to protect themselves from natural disasters, technology crises and homeland security threats.

"Australia has the opportunity to become the disaster recovery hub for Asia Pacific," said Christopher L. Ride, managing director of Interactive. "Our stable political, economic and social climate combined with our significant pool of IT engineering skills offers Asia-region businesses a highly compelling proposition to base their disaster recovery in Australia."

The veracity of disasters, both man made and born of mother nature, over the last year are motivating more and more companies to put together plans for redundancy. And those that haven't thought about it until now are certain to be getting twitchy.

Those who would rather outsource their disaster recovery will be happy to know that Interactive today unveiled its A$13.5 million high-tech disaster recovery facility near North Sydney, part of an Australia-wide network of walk-in recovery centres.

"The days of 'she'll be right mate' are long gone," Ride said. Businesses and government cannot be complacent when it comes to planning for the worst, given their heavy reliance on technology and telephony infrastructure to provide even basic services."

"Businesses cannot afford to be out of action for days or even hours," Ride said. "Key staff should have immediate access to offsite recovery facilities where they can walk-in and carry-on with essential services using mirrored copies of their data, hardware, software and telephone systems."

The key components of Interactive's Disaster Recovery Services include:- An Australia-wide network of DR centres - Dedicated and multi-subscriber mainframe, server and call centre facilities- Cold, Warm and Hot environments- Defined response times- Dedicated engineers available within 15 minutes- Support for all major hardware platforms- Limited subscriber numbers to guarantee against conflicting Emergencies- Metro and regional parts warehouses

At a time when many companies are offshoring their IT operations, Interactive has bucked the trend and created more than 60 technical jobs for skilled computer engineers across its Australian disaster recovery network. Indeed, becoming a disaster recovery hub not just for Australian businesses, but for clients all over Asia-Pacific shows that outsourcing is not limited to India and China.

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