Businesses today are more dependent on technology than ever before. From corporate email and file sharing to ERP, CRM, and mission-critical applications, our ability to serve customers and keep operations humming relies heavily on connected systems being available around the clock.
But in our digitally-driven world, unplanned IT outages and disruptions are inevitable. Whether it’s a natural disaster knocking out power, a malicious cybersecurity attack, or just good old human error, there are countless events that can bring your technological engines to a screeching halt.
No business is immune. Just look at the major cloud provider outage in December 2022 that disrupted operations for millions of customers across the U.S. Or the widespread ransomware attack in 2021 that crippled organizations across multiple industries. And we’ve all experienced those minor inconveniences when critical cloud apps or services become unavailable unexpectedly.
The costs and impacts of downtime can be staggering – lost sales, missed SLAs, angry customers, regulatory penalties, damaged reputation, and more. Did you know that for 98% of organizations, a single hour of downtime costs over $100,000? And for 86%, it costs over $300,000. That number keeps getting higher every year.
When thepaychecks stop hitting and the revenues dry up, even a short amount of downtime can be catastrophic for many businesses. In fact, studies show that 93% of companies that experience a disaster and don’t have a tried-and-true plan for recovery go out of business within a year.
Effective business continuity planning is no longer a nice-to-have, but a must-have for organizations across every sector. Having proactive strategies and solutions in place to prevent downtime and maintain continuous operations during and after a crisis is of utmost importance.
That’s where Oracle NetSuite’s cloud technologies can be an invaluable tool for fortifying your business against disasters and disruptive events. Let’s go under the hood to understand how NetSuite keeps critical data and systems safeguarded and consistently accessible, even when the unexpected happens.
Cloud Redundancy and High Availability One of the core technological advantages of NetSuite’s modern cloud platform is redundancy and high availability baked into every layer of its infrastructure and architecture. By design, there are no single points of failure across the entire cloud stack.
For example, NetSuite’s application services run simultaneously across multiple servers and data centers located in different geographic regions. If an event knocks out one data center, application services automatically and instantly “fail over” to other available locations without disruption.
It’s the same concept under the hood for databases, storage, networks, and all other components supporting the NetSuite cloud. This N+1 redundancy approach means there is always a backup of your data, systems, and connectivity ready to take over if the primary resource becomes unavailable for any reason.
And because NetSuite utilizes an advanced cloud foundation with automated load balancing, self-healing compute instances, and dynamic failover, you can achieve levels of uptime and reliability that are virtually impossible to attain with on-premises infrastructure and traditional disaster recovery methods.
With a cloud native system like NetSuite, there’s no need to pay for, manage, and maintain expensive redundant data centers, backup solutions, hot disaster recovery sites, and all the other manual process overhead.
While traditional enterprise apps and infrastructure can see significant downtime from a service disruption, NetSuite is engineered to deliver extremely high availability, durability, and fault tolerance as an always-on cloud service.
Meticulous Data Security and Compliance Another key benefit of NetSuite’s holistic approach to business continuity is certified, enterprise-grade data security and compliance. This helps organizations maintain regulatory compliance, safeguard intellectual property, and ensure privacy for sensitive information even amid unexpected events.
NetSuite’s comprehensive cybersecurity protocols span logical security capabilities (encryption, access controls, role-based permissions, audit trails, etc.) as well as physical security controls across its data center facilities.
Some of the key data protection and privacy measures include:
- Stringent data encryption in transit and at rest
- Granular access controls with role-based permissions
- Unified audit trails and activity monitoring
- Protection of stored customer data through anonymization
- Background checks and security training for all personnel
- Physical security at all production data centers, including biometrics
- Integrated governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC)
NetSuite not only delivers these advanced security controls out-of-the-box, but also provides automated policy enforcement, continuous monitoring, and detailed audit trails and reporting tailored for all major global and industry regulations like SOC, ISO, PCI-DSS, GDPR, HIPAA, and more.
This multi-layered security posture is extremely difficult and costly to replicate with traditional on-premises systems. By relying on NetSuite’s cloud, you can redirect precious resources away from grueling security management tasks and audits to focus on your core business.
Automatic Software Updates and Upgrades Outdated or misconfigured software is one of the leading contributors to vulnerabilities that disrupt business continuity. On-premises software requires manually applying patches, fixes, updates, and upgrades – a tedious, risky, and error-prone effort that often gets skipped or delayed.
With NetSuite’s multi-tenant cloud architecture, all software is centralized and automatically updated across the entire user base on a frequent and consistent cadence. Everyone is always running the latest, most secure, and most feature-rich software version without any hands-on maintenance or upgrades required.
Beyond eliminating tedious upgrades and patches, this efficient cloud model also makes it far easier to recover systems and data following any sort of disruption. NetSuite can simply re-provision your org to its most recent backup or snapshot version in minutes – far more quickly than restoring on-site software, databases, and servers from backups.
World-Class Data Centers and Infrastructure While cloud abstracts infrastructure concerns away from customers, NetSuite doesn’t take data center uptime and infrastructure reliability lightly. NetSuite’s cloud services run on an extremely robust, enterprise-class cloud backbone.
NetSuite’s cloud infrastructure leverages multiple state-of-the-art data centers located across different regions and internet backbone providers. Each data center has redundant power supplies, cooling systems, internet connections, rack-level battery backup, and more.
All data is continuously replicated across multiple active data centers to ensure high availability and business continuity in the event of a major disaster affecting one facility. NetSuite’s infrastructure utilizes automatic load balancing and failover logic as well.
This level of built-in redundancy, geographic distribution, and resilience would be exorbitantly expensive and complex to replicate for businesses trying to host everything themselves on-premises or through colocation.
The result is a highly scalable, high-performance cloud that delivers guaranteed uptimes backed by comprehensive service level agreements (SLAs). For example, NetSuite’s flagship SLA ensures 99.5% uptime or better with limited periods of planned downtime. There’s also an annual uptime SLA of 99.7% for data center infrastructure availability.
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Global Accessibility and Remote Workforce Support With the rise of remote and hybrid work models in the wake of the pandemic, business continuity plans must also account for distributed teams who need reliable access to tools and systems outside of a traditional office setting.
NetSuite’s true cloud delivery allows any employee, partner, or stakeholder to securely log into the platform and keep business operations running by simply connecting from any location and almost any internet-enabled device.
No VPN connections or added complexity are required for remote access – NetSuite is globally accessible across desktop, mobile apps, and web browsers. Should an unexpected scenario force your workforce out of office locations, business-critical applications and data remain continuously accessible.
NetSuite’s mobility solutions are also tightly integrated with core cloud ERP capabilities. For example, account managers can take orders in the field, HR reps can manage employee data remotely, and executives can view real-time analytics from anywhere. This flexibility increases resilience for organizations to react quickly to unforeseen events while minimizing disruption.
Additionally, with anytime/anywhere access to current information in NetSuite’s cloud, distributed teams can stay aligned on the latest operational updates and course-correct together seamlessly. Transparent collaboration and communication are key ingredients for executing effective continuity plans.
Scalable for Any Scenario Another important pillar of business continuity is having the ability to dynamically adapt and scale resources to meet evolving demands during a crisis event. Spiky capacity needs during an emergency situation are exceedingly difficult and costly to handle with on-premises solutions.
In contrast, NetSuite’s cloud ERP system can instantly scale compute, storage, and networking resources up or down as needed to accommodate changing usage patterns or traffic spikes. You only pay for what you use, avoiding massive over-provisioning exercises.
For instance, if a hurricane forces your contact center staff to “work from home” while managing a flood of customer calls, it’s a seamless adjustment to provision more user licenses or beef up system capacity in NetSuite’s cloud with just a few clicks. The same flexibility applies to spikes in ecommerce order volumes, supply chain disruptions requiring major rerouting, and more.
In contrast, rapidly scaling traditional on-premises systems during an emergency would require an incredibly arduous process of purchasing, provisioning, and deploying all new hardware and software instances — assuming those resources were even available to purchase quickly. Not exactly an ideal situation when every moment of downtime is severely impacting operations.
With NetSuite’s cloud model, your business stays agile and responsive to continually align IT capacity with fluctuating real-time demands, no matter how dramatically the situation changes. You can be confident knowing your business systems will automatically scale to meet any spike in demand.
Business Continuity Built for the Future Even with NetSuite’s robust cloud architecture and built-in continuity capabilities, technology leaders understand the critical importance of implementing thoughtful processes and governance around continuity planning. That’s why NetSuite provides best-practice methodologies and tools to fortify your cloud solutions with organizational resilience.
With NetSuite’s integrated governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) solutions, IT teams can document and automate all facets of business continuity strategies, such as:
- Establishing continuity policies and procedures
- Defining roles, responsibilities, and communication plans
- Mapping operational processes and contingency plans
- Testing and exercising recovery capabilities
- Aligning to regulatory requirements and audit controls
By combining resilient cloud technologies with formalized continuity strategy implementation, NetSuite empowers customers to achieve a truly holistic business continuity posture. Continuity isn’t an afterthought – it’s baked into the underlying DNA and surrounding processes.
Additionally, as new risks, threats, and continuity challenges inevitably emerge, you can take comfort knowing NetSuite continuously evolves its cloud platform to safeguard your business moving forward. Customers benefit from NetSuite’s continuous investment into cloud operations, security, compliance, and leading-edge continuity capabilities without any extra effort.
Trust the Experts in Cloud Continuity At the end of the day, business continuity and disaster recovery require a highly strategic, multi-layered approach stretching across people, processes, and technology. Attempting to go-it-alone or cobble together everything needed for an effective continuity strategy is extremely complicated, risky, and expensive.
By transitioning core business systems to NetSuite’s cloud ERP suite, organizations can cost-effectively harness tools built from the ground-up with continuity, security, and resilience as foundational pillars. One integrated cloud provides the high-availability architecture, robust governance controls, mobility support, and unlimited scalability to overcome any disruption seamlessly.
In NetSuite’s world-class cloud infrastructure, your business-critical data, systems, and processes are protected by best-in-class continuity technologies monitored 24/7/365 by a deep bench of cloud experts across Oracle’s global operations centers. With guaranteed uptimes backed by industry-leading SLAs, you can sleep easy knowing your operations will persevere through unforeseen events.
When evaluating the cost of downtime, ransomware attacks, compliance penalties, reputational damage and other potential consequences of being under-prepared for a crisis — the question becomes whether you can afford not to modernize with a true cloud built for ultimate business resilience.
Don’t leave your organization’s future up to outdated business continuity methods and fragile IT environments. Ride the wave of digital resilience by making NetSuite’s cloud the cornerstone of your world-class continuity strategy. Your business will be ready to weather any storm that comes its way.
FAQs:
Business continuity refers to the ability of an organization to maintain essential functions during and after a disaster or unexpected event. It is crucial because unplanned IT outages, natural disasters, cybersecurity attacks, or human errors can disrupt operations, leading to significant financial losses, customer dissatisfaction, and even business failure.
NetSuite’s cloud platform is designed with redundancy and high availability at every layer. It uses multiple servers and data centers in different geographic regions, ensuring that if one data center fails, services automatically and instantly fail over to other locations. This approach ensures continuous availability of critical data and applications.
NetSuite’s cloud architecture ensures that all software is automatically updated across its user base. This eliminates the need for manual patches and upgrades, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities and ensuring that all users have access to the latest, most secure software versions without any hands-on maintenance.
NetSuite employs enterprise-grade data security and compliance measures, including data encryption in transit and at rest, granular access controls, unified audit trails, and physical security at data centers. It complies with global and industry regulations like SOC, ISO, PCI-DSS, GDPR, and HIPAA, ensuring that sensitive information is protected and regulatory requirements are met.
NetSuite’s cloud infrastructure includes multiple state-of-the-art data centers with redundant power supplies, cooling systems, and internet connections. Data is continuously replicated across multiple data centers, ensuring high availability and rapid recovery in case of a disaster, thereby supporting uninterrupted business operations.
NetSuite’s cloud platform allows employees, partners, and stakeholders to securely access the system from any location and device with internet connectivity. This eliminates the need for VPN connections and ensures that business operations can continue seamlessly, even when teams are working remotely or from different locations.
Yes, NetSuite’s cloud ERP system can dynamically scale compute, storage, and networking resources up or down based on real-time demands. This flexibility ensures that businesses can handle spikes in usage or changes in operations during emergencies without over-provisioning resources.
NetSuite provides comprehensive service level agreements (SLAs) that guarantee 99.5% uptime or better for its cloud services. This high level of uptime assurance is backed by NetSuite’s robust cloud infrastructure and redundancy measures, ensuring reliable access to business-critical applications and data.
NetSuite offers integrated governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) solutions to document and automate business continuity strategies. This includes establishing policies and procedures, defining roles and communication plans, mapping contingency plans, testing recovery capabilities, and aligning with regulatory requirements.
Transitioning to NetSuite’s cloud ERP offers businesses a cost-effective solution for ensuring continuity, security, and resilience. NetSuite’s high-availability architecture, robust security controls, mobility support, and scalability help businesses effectively manage disruptions and maintain operations, reducing the risk of significant downtime and its associated impacts.
