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Tuesday, 26 January 2021 14:21

Is Your Facility Safe?

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Disaster recovery and business continuity sound quite abstract terms in the context of a creative post-production environment. However, these strategies and plans represent insurance policies against loss of data and – more importantly – loss of work-in-progress.

There are people who believe ‘it will never happen to me’ and then catastrophe strikes. The only realistic outcome is that we get to understand the full consequences of a major outage on a business, their people, their clients and their reputation.

At Marquis, we see two sides to this: those that have our software, and those that don’t and who subsequently wished they did. Imagine your business is on the Titanic and racing towards a metaphorical iceberg; of course, with hindsight, the Titanic disaster could and should have been avoided.

In the modern world, the production ‘iceberg’ comes in many forms and we have seen it all. Catastrophic hardware failure, malicious attack, software virus, fire, flood, strikes, power outage, theft, black mould, legionella and incompetence to name but a few.

There is another business risk that isn’t quite so obvious and that’s the use of legacy disaster recovery systems that are no longer fit for purpose. In the age of UHD production, with RAW footage, production systems have progressively become larger and larger. However, the recovery time for a large production system using conventional disaster recovery software can be months, even with the fastest available networks. In some ways, this delay to business resumption is as shocking as the initial failure.

In fact, the acid question is, ‘From a major failure, how long is the delay before I can resume production?’. If the answer isn’t hours but instead many days, weeks or months, then this is a huge risk to the business – potentially without mitigation.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. Using clever project analytics, we can enable an informed and prioritised recovery of the most production-critical projects. In certain circumstances, this recovery could be 1000x faster than using conventional DR software. So at the simplest level, this means business as usual for a facility, with your clients receiving their production delivered as promised. And at the most significant level, our software could save your business.

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Paul Glasgow

Managing Director