Reviewing your data center’s risks and threats is unique for every customer and every data center location. Analyzing ways to mitigate those threats help you increase your data center’s overall availability. Higher availability helps you achieve you SLA's for application uptime to your end-users. SMS helps you with all these services.

SMS has a proven approach for Data Center Risk and Threat Assessment that is recognized throughout the industry. Our experts on this subject present it frequently at national DR meetings like ASDR 2006. Our assessment of your environment reviews all man-made, technical, and natural threats to the availability of your data center and its contents and delivers a report for immediate action to mitigate those threats. Eleven categories are reviewed and a score is given to each category for your company to measure its improvements.

Once complete, the impact and duration of site specific threats are analyzed. These include threats like:

• Natural Disasters like flooding, tornadoes, rain, wind
• Earth Issues like sinkholes, earthquakes
• Man made events like terrorism, pandemics
• Hazardous materials
• Computer virus attacks and over 31 other threats

The detailed findings report included in the deliverables allows you to review each item that was found not to be best practice. This report is sorted to display the “high impact, low cost” items on the top. This “best value list” helps you to immediately mitigate threats and increase availability. The prioritized action plan, also included in the deliverables, can be used as a project roadmap to mitigate the other risks and threats.

Most companies forget to develop their crisis management team when building their business continuity / disaster recovery program. As important, the IT organization must be able to respond to an unplanned event in a coordinated fashion or else it won’t matter how well your recovery plans have been developed or how well your HA configurations work.

Your team must know how to evacuate the facility, account for its personnel, and how to assess damages. The team will immediately know who is in charge, others that need to be called, and where to meet. No indecisiveness or discussions are needed at this point.

Setting pre-defined severity levels helps you decide whether to declare a disaster or not. Only authorized personnel should be able to declare and activate one or all of the recovery plans.

This is where SMS can help you build your crisis team, develop the roles and responsibilities, and define your event management process. Our service includes training, immediate response booklets, and mock disaster events that allow your team to practice what it has learned.