Continuity Planning 101 — A Continuing

In-house or Hosted?

“A man who does not think and plan long ahead will find trouble right at his door.” — Confucius

This educational series has continually emphasized that a business needs a continuity plan. However, there are many alternatives so where do you begin? This month’s column will consider the most basic choice of all — should a company deploy an in-house plan our use outsourced services?

Let’s look at an in-house fault tolerant solution deployed at Neutrik USA of Lakewood, New Jersey. Fault tolerance is defined as “a design methodology aimed at surviving component failures,” and is probably the simplest implementation of a business continuity solution. Neutrik’s system was installed and is maintained by CiBan (http://www.ciban.com). Faxing is very important to Neutrik as approximately 90% of their customers submit purchase orders by fax.

A essential part of the plan was to identify products built on Microsoft (News - Alert).NET with an N-Tier Architecture. To leverage the N-Tier architecture of the fax server, a Cisco Content Switch was used to achieve fault tolerance of the browser based “Presentation Layer”. A Microsoft Passive cluster architecture with a dual server design was utilized to provide additional data security. For more details on this design please go to http://www.tmcnet.com/disaster-planning and select “white papers and case studies”.

In the healthcare industry, in-house solutions can actually present a major disadvantage due to HIPAA-mandated security issues. SecureCare Technologies, Inc. (http://www.securecaretech.com) offers a Internet-based service, Sfax™ , that is a fully HIPAA-compliant secure electronic fax management system. Sfax provides the secure transfer of patient health information (PHI), a feature virtually nonexistent with manual faxing, and also includes an electronic signature feature using digital certificates. As a hosted service, SecureCare eliminates the need for a fax server deployment and in-house HIPAA or IT expertise so initial costs are kept at a minimum. In addition, SecureCare says Sfax can save healthcare organizations 95% of the time and 80% of the cost of manual faxing. For more details on this design please go to http://www.tmcnet.com/disaster-planning and select “white papers and case studies”.

For additional information on business solutions please go to http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/disaster-planning. If you are interested in becoming a member select “DPCF Members Form” or contact Max Schroeder (News - Alert) directly at [email protected] or [email protected]. IT

Max Schroeder is the Senior Vice President of FaxCore, Inc. (http://www.faxcore.com ).

» Internet Telephony Magazine Table of Contents