Consonus IT Business Solutions

Through a combination of Disaster Recovery, Virtualization, and Data Protection solutions, Consonus helps customers build, manage, and support mission-critical computing environments, advancing the data center.
Customers count on us to:

Improve the impact of the data center on the business
Advance the operational excellence and IT infrastructure of the data center
Best leverage existing IT assets
Migrate to newer architectures

Uniquely positioned to meet customers' IT needs Consonus’ IT Business Solutions optimize customers' financial and operational resources across any one or a combination of three data center environments : at the customer’s data center, a virtual data center, or at any of Consonus’ Tier IV SAS70 Type II data centers.

This flexibility, known as the Consonus Flexible Delivery Model, enables each Consonus customer to achieve the optimal mix of capital and operating expenditures, timing, business risk, operating models, and deployment.

Consonus IT Consulting Services and Professional Services support high-quality migration strategies and flawless execution. With 20 years’ experience and 97% good to excellent Customer Satisfaction ratings, Consonus offers delivery you can trust and – with more than 80 members of staff certified by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library and the Disaster Recovery International Institute – knowledge you can count on. Consonus’ rock-solid infrastructure features Tier III and Tier IV SAS70 Type II Data Centers. Finally, with Consonus, support is always available when you need it, 24x7.

How Important is Data Protection?

Unavailable data impacts many core business functions that can compromise data security, avalibility, recovery, and operational profitability. The average cost of just one hour of downtime can exceed $100,000. When you consider the loss of revenue associated with data down time, or risking compliance violations, you realize how quickly you need to recover data before it seriously damages your business.

Consonus Data Protection Solutions

One data protection strategy does NOT fit all. Rather, directly tying your business’ retention policies, Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (ROPs) provides for an effective data protection strategy. Consonus Data Protection Solutions provide businesses with a technology and process roadmap which can incorporate improvements to current backup configurations as well as provide an upgrade strategy. Consonus’s data protection addresses four key business objectives:

You must increase

Service Levels: A constant challenge as the business strives to serve customers and outmaneuver the competition.
Innovation: Currently 76% of the average IT solutions budget is dedicated to existing capabilities, and only 24% goes to new. New capabilities triggered by innovation enable your competitive edge.

You must reduce

Risk: such as enabling Disaster Recovery and security, managing against outages, or complying with regulations.
Cost: It’s a mandate to drive cost out of IT business solutions, both capital expenditures and operational expenditures, and to increase utilization of capital assets.

Consonus data protection assessments can serve as a key component of your comprehensive disaster recovery plan. Our recommendations for data security improvements address new technical capabilities, integration with data storage and data encryption applications, and consolidation of environments. In addition, we offer flexible delivery models, such as virtual data center solutions and managed services.

Reduce IT Costs with Virtualization

According to the Forrester Server Virtualization Inquiry Spotlight 2008, only 24% of customers surveyed were expecting better than 6 virtual machines (VMs) to each physical server. Contrast this with the top, experienced virtualization environments, which achieve 10 or more VMs per server, and up to 50 VMs on a four-socket server.

Challenges of successful virtualization solutions include:

The lack of VM, Operating System (OS), and other IT infrastructure standardization leads to overly complex environments, which diminishes consolidation savings
The need to invest in upgrading SANs, Backup, and Management tools eats into Return on Investment (ROI)
A lack of process standardization inhibits operational efficiencies
47% of customers do not have proper Virtualization skills, according to an Enterprise Management Associates survey of 150 IT directors in 2007

The cost of virtualization performed without an actionable plan is significant:

An effective, actionable virtualization strategy should consider the impact beyond just servers, such as:

SANs and Storage
Data Protection
Security
Manageability
Service and Sustainability

Consonus Virtualization Solutions typically reduce IT infrastructure costs by 50% to 70% by enabling you with an optimized IT infrastructure that embraces a variety of hardware, operating systems, applications, and network configurations. Consonus Virtualization reduces cost and complexity and serves as a foundation for better availability, manageability, and recoverability.

Representing the top names in virtualization technologies, Consonus has been providing storage and server virtualization services in highly available data center environments for over 10 years. Consonus plans, engineers, and operates our own data centers using secure multi-tenant virtualized servers, storage, networks and applications – and these data centers provide virtualized services to a wide range of customers with rigorous SLAs.

Consonus directly supports all the IT solutions we provide with 24x7 Customer Care and dedicated Customer Service Managers.

Read more about Consonus Virtualization
Learn about the Consonus Virtualization Assessment

Disaster Recovery Is Critical to Your Business

According to a Gartner Group study, 2 out of 5 companies that experience a catastrophic event or prolonged outage NEVER resume operations. Of those that DO resume operations, 1 out of every 3 companies goes out of business within 2 years. That means that 60% of all organizations affected by a major disaster go out of business within 2 years, for various reasons, including the cost of trying to resume operations, and losing the goodwill of customers.

Disaster Recovery is NOT a luxury item, and tough economic times may make an effective Disaster Recovery Plan more important than ever – because businesses tend to be less resilient.

An effective Disaster Recovery Plan addresses the data, hardware, software, personnel, IT facilities, and IT recovery procedures critical for a business to restore critical IT solutions in the event of natural or human-created disaster. A key component of a Business Continuity Plan, which addresses other facilities, business unit personnel, equipment, logistics and operational processes necessary to recover and continue business operations, a Disaster Recovery Plan manages against the real IT risks that can quickly become disasters, including localized IT systems or network failures, extended power or telecommunications outages, weather damage, fires, floods, cyber attacks, and internal sabotage.

Based on Consonus’s nearly two decades’ experience in optimizing IT business solutions, we recommend a Business Impact Analysis as the first step to an effective disaster recovery plan. In the Business Impact Analysis (BIA), Consonus interviews business leaders from all of your major functional areas, focusing on the identification of critical business processes and services and the interdependence of those processes and services. Moreover, we assess the customer, financial and regulatory exposures that may result from interruptions in these services for reliable disaster recovery solutions. Through the BIA, we collaboratively determine your Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) – the maximum tolerance duration of disruption of service – and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) – the point to which we must recover data or, in other words, the maximum tolerable data loss. The result is the establishment of Recovery Priority Tiers based on your unique processes, services, IT Infrastructures, RTOs and RPOs:

Recovery Priority Tier Disaster Recovery Description
Recovery Priority 1
Same-business-day recovery Business Services whose unavailability more than a brief period can have a severe impact on time-critical business operations.
Recovery Priority 2
One-day recovery Business Services whose unavailability significantly impacts customer service or bank operations.
Recovery Priority 3
Two-day recovery Business Services which can tolerate at least two days of disruption in a disaster.
Recovery Priority 4
Four-day recovery Business Services which can tolerate at least four days of disruption in a disaster. Restoration of priority 3 functions in less time, depending on the situation. However, restoring higher priority functions first.

Today there is an increased awareness of the physical risks to IT facilities, services and assets. Online business hosting models, rising customer expectations, growing IT complexity, and increased regulatory exposure invalidate many assumptions of existing Disaster Recovery plans. It is no longer acceptable to be down for days, and in fact, according to a Harris Poll, most businesses require a 5-hour RTO to avoid closure!

Consonus offers a full spectrum of Disaster Recovery Solutions, and our consultants hold current Business Continuity Planning certifications from the Disaster Recovery Institute International (DRII).

Request more information today by clicking here to request an email or telephone response from an expert member of the Consonus team.