Professional Services

Today's sad news is that the disasters of the 20th century seem somewhat comforting in comparison with those we face nowadays. We know we can survive the tragedies, the question is can we survive the mess?

What is "Disaster Recovery?" The act of regaining control after an event resulting in great loss and misfortune. In IT terms it is recovering data centers following a catastrophe, either natural or man-made.

What is "Continuous Availability"? The state of business stability, where critical systems and networks are always available. To attain and sustain such business continuity, companies must design into every process the essential aspects of availability, security and reliability.

Continuity Management Program

Few organizations have the time, money and expertise to develop a comprehensive business continuity management program internally. Often, day-to-day pressures prevent managers from 'stepping-back' and addressing their operational issues and strategic planning. Every organization has different needs. We have developed a modular approach, tailored to meet your unique objectives and requirements.

We provide customer-focused, cost-effective solutions to keep your business up and running. Our services include identifying your vulnerabilities, assessing the impact on your business activities, developing a comprehensive strategy and implementing a turn-key plan to manage the risks. We help our clients anticipate change. We help them put their best ideas into effect and offer the benefit of lessons and experience accumulated in dealing with Fortune 500 companies. Our services combine proven business and technological expertise with exceptional resources.

Our unique advantages
  • A neutral, objective party
  • A fresh perspective
  • Decades of experience with best practices
  • Lessons learned
  • Resources to identify and focus on critical problems
  • A Stratus dedicated partner since 1986

Our Mission

The work of our experts is always directed by the customer. No two sites are alike. We understand that different customers have different requirements. We develop our work plan as we progress and learn more about the customer's specific requirements and priorities. Our work is based on interviews with all levels of your IT staff - development, operations, security, performance and QA.

We examine the effectiveness of day-to-day operations and monitor system and application behavior. As necessary, we collect system meters, system and application events to acquire understanding of your system's strengths and weaknesses. Our interviews and on-site work are key elements of our assessment process.

Why outsource?

A team effort combining the best ideas of those closest to the business with impartial approach of an outside firm, ensures the most effective way of preparing organizations to meet their challenges. Moreover, outside assistance provide new perspective and exposure to the best practices and lessons learned from other organizations. When you need to assure the continuity of your IT-intensive business, an in-depth external audit can make the essential difference.

Security Audit

We review your current security controls and procedures employed at your site, to identify your system's security strengths and weaknesses. Our process includes close examination of security planning and compliance, access control, privileges, user and password management. We identify your system's vulnerabilities and suggest balanced and practical options to reduce your security risks. You should be well prepared for your next audit !

Performance and Capacity Review

We collect system meters, historical performance data, resource utilization and look for signs of impending problems. We do it at the system, application and process levels. Every element of the application is reviewed - online programs, batch and night-cycle activities, communications interfaces and database management. Our objective is to identify and address performance problems before they affect business operations.

We will
  • Identify performance bottlenecks
  • Identify application design and architecture issues
  • Help avoid the pitfalls
  • Maximize overall uptime
  • Define user preferences and business requirements
  • Assess current architecture
  • Identify development & operational risks
  • Resolve security issues
  • Review system capacity

Disaster Recovery

Within the assessment process we identify critical business functions, recovery time frames, priorities, technical dependencies and database considerations. We use our well-established methodologies to evaluate current practices and procedures. We then compare our findings not only to management expectations but also to a realistic potential outcome in a disaster situation.

Night Cycles & Batch Automation

Are you tired of dealing with production problems caused during the night cycle? We've witnessed customers that battle daily with complicated batch cycle running and scheduling hundreds of job every week. Delays and problems during Batch ultimately affect the following business day - delays, missing reports, jobs that did not run and corrupted or lost databases. Monitoring Batch takes a lot of human resources and expertise that may not be readily available throughout the night. We've seen customers that have to bring their critical business application down to allow Batch to run. For these reasons, Batch is considered, many times, a high-risk area. Does all this sound familiar? We can help! Using our structured methodologies we can help you put things in order and sort out all the pieces, dependencies and timing considerations. Our objective is to automate these procedures as much as possible so that Batch will require much less human intervention and therefore reduce the current risks.

Business Continuity Auditing & Risk Assessment

We interview managers, developers and end-users to gain full understanding of your business goals, user's needs, availability requirements, current architecture and technology, functional requirements, procedures and operations, system capacity, performance and overall security. Every aspect of your system that may affect continuous availability will be thoroughly examined.

Enterprise Fault Tolerance - Problem Detection and Handling

We continue to work with your staff and review how critical events and system problems are detected and handled. As we all know, a chain is as strong as its weakest link. Our mission is to address potential issues that may affect system availability. It is clear that operating a critical application on fault tolerant computers does not guaranty availability if we neglect other important factors such as procedures, system resources, security, operations and not to mention application design considerations. We categorize our findings into high risk, medium risk, and low risk frameworks. Our reviews are performed at both enterprise and business unit levels. Our work provides the opportunity to review the overall status and to design an internal business continuity program.

Application Design Review

We study your application - transaction flows, user-interfaces, network/communications, development cycle and procedures, quality assurance, performance and availability. We recommend to apply such examination not only to existing applications, but also to new projects before they are started. Decisions made during the design phase may have a profound impact on application availability and future performance. It is, by far, less expensive to develop a well designed application than fixing design issues at a later stage. We use a proactive process and outline how your application may be made more robust, forgiving and immune to day-to-day glitches. We sort out issues such as redundant execution, inefficient database design, difficulties in inter-process communications, performance pitfalls, upgrades and software change problems, diagnostics and event logging.

Stress Testing

Do you know what is your application's breaking point? What is the maximum transaction rate that the system can handle? What would be the response time? How long will your system survive ongoing stress? Do you have enough disk space? What will happen to your communications bandwidth? Implementing stress-testing strategy, as part of your routine operations and as an integral part of your quality assurance procedures and pre-production effort, will help you understand the limitations of your system. Not only that - many issues that may go unnoticed will quickly surface and become evident. Our experts will help you develop and implement a comprehensive plan with different test cases you may require. We will help you design and implement simulation software that will allow you to properly and consistently stress your system.

Key Deliverables

We document our findings along with recommendations and suggestions. This may include any issues that could affect application design, operational activities, system security, capacity, communications and more. Our action items and finding are prioritized, based on your input and will become the foundation for future improvements. You receive an assessment of all the areas evaluated. We document issues that require attention and provide recommendations for action. This process will assist you in ensuring the reliability and dependability of your mission-critical systems, vital applications, and IT infrastructure. We are here to help you coordinate all elements of the recovery process, working closely with your personnel and guiding them through all the relevant elements of this process. We will be behind your team and help them gain the necessary knowledge to maintain your critical application.