The Importance of BU/DR in the Manufacturing Industry

What would happen to your organization if plant production was taken to a halt?  How would you get it back up and running?  Or, could you?

Whether the disaster is caused by mother nature, a human error, a cyber-attack of some sort (and yes, there are many types), it can wreak havoc on your organization – it can even take the company down to its knees.  Each moment of downtime equates to lost dollars and lost customer satisfaction. Manufacturing firms have to effectively ensure that production and distribution is consistent.

Technology is used throughout manufacturing in many ways – to store data, run automated machinery on the plant floor, track inventory and support distribution. Your technology is intertwined with your business processes and if you suddenly weren’t able to use those processes, it could be a catastrophic situation.

A few scenarios of how a disaster can disrupt manufacturing, and what you can proactively avoid it.

Halt in Production.  Complex automated equipment and inventory tracking are just two processes that are severely influenced during a disaster. Do you have a recovery plan in place for a worst-case scenario?  Production logistics may be the most challenging area to recuperate, but having a strong backup and disaster recovery (BU/DR) plan safeguards data and allows for immediate access to mission-critical applications.

Whether your organization experiences a cyber-attack, or even a power outage that shuts down productivity for several hours, all of your applications used to run the automated machinery will not work because the system cannot connect to the network. Depending on the size of your plant(s), you could be facing up to millions of dollars in lost revenue and customer reimbursement.

BU/DR To The Rescue.  If your senior management team turned to a BU/DR expert – like Bryley Systems –  to assess the possible vulnerabilities associated with an outage and developed a proactive plan to recover and access data, your BU/DR provider would be able to access your data and apps to get your operations back up and running with a minimum amount of downtime.

Halt in Distribution.  Downtime is never acceptable when it comes to distribution.  All schedules must be strictly followed to satisfy delivery expectations. Customers don’t care if your warehouse floods.  They want to receive their order on time. Logistics management utilizes computerized tracking and ERP systems to understand how many products are stored and where they are at any given time to enhance product readiness and customer fulfillment.

Imagine this scenario – you work as an IT Director for a large New England pharmaceutical manufacturing company. Your network is more vulnerable to external hacker attempts simply due to the size of your business and the value of your data.   All of a sudden, your systems are corrupted with vicious malware and the entire database is inaccessible. To continue operations at your normal efficiency level and avoid downtime, your backup and recovery disaster plan kicks in to eliminate the malware and restore your plant data to where it was before the attack. Investing in a custom BU/DR plan serves as disaster protection ensuring your ability to move products to their destination.

The key to effective disaster recovery is planning ahead. Partnering with a BU/DR professional to support your critical infrastructure and resources adds additional layers of security and communication. When unexpected disasters strike, your recovery strategy will be there to save the day by restoring your data and reducing your downtime.

The Bryley BU/DR process:

• For on-premise equipment, we deploy a BU/DR appliance onsite to provide local backup-and-restore capability and to speed recovery.
• We take an encrypted image of your system and copy it to our data center.
• We stream encrypted, differential changes from your site to our datacenter

Isn’t the survival and security of your manufacturing organization worth the investment of BU/DR?  Our team of experts will help you navigate through this process and implement the most effective BU/DR tailored to your environment and budget.  Contact us at 978-562-6077, or by email at ITExperts@Bryley.com to learn more. We are here to help.

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