Business Continuity

Business Continuity Measures for Your Organization

By partnering with OmegaFi, you can enjoy some piece of mind that no matter what damage might one day fall upon the chapter house or your physical location, your data and the essential information you need to run your operations are safe.

Why Business Continuity Matters

Fraternal organizations have existed for centuries. Continuing the good work of the organization from one year to the next and one generation to the next is critical to the brotherhood and sisterhood we promote.

Fraternal organizations rely on OmegaFi to help them run their business. Unfortunately, there are many potential disasters that could occur at a chapter house or inter/national headquarters facility – a fire, tornado, theft, malicious computer hacker, a disgruntled member/employee, even a lost laptop – any number of scenarios could have devastating consequences.

By partnering with OmegaFi, you can enjoy some piece of mind that no matter what damage might one day fall upon the chapter house or your physical location, your data and the essential information you need to run your operations are safe.

Just as a man-made or natural disaster could create havoc for your organization, a disruption at OmegaFi could also have a devastating effect on the health and stability of a fraternal organization at the local, regional and inter/national level.

That is why OmegaFi takes extraordinary steps to recognize, mitigate and eliminate significant events that may threaten OmegaFi’s ability – and in turn, the ability of our clients – to continue normal business operations.

A Strong Commitment to Business Continuity

OmegaFi was one of the very early adopters of the “cloud” computing philosophy when we moved to a SaaS (software-as-a-service) model with common, centralized storage of all data in the mid-1990s.  Clients no longer needed to maintain hardware to host their data locally. Clients no longer needed to worry about the physical security of their hardware or their information, or maintain a consistent program of data replication through backups. For many years, clients have had access to all of OmegaFi’s services and to their data through a web browser.

For obvious reasons, we do not disclose details of our data security defenses, but with the growing role of the cloud in the technological life of fraternal organizations, we believe it is prudent to share a broad summary of our business continuity program, which ensures that our clients have access to their data and that our company and our clients will be able to operate with minimal disruption in case of a natural or technical disaster.

Continuity Goals

OmegaFi’s goals for client and corporate data are:

• Uptime of 99.75%
• A maximum 15-minute latency between production and disaster recovery datasets.

What is OmegaFi Doing to Ensure Business Continuity?

• OmegaFi maintains three physically distinct network environments, which allow us to minimize company and client downtime in the event of a small or large disaster scenario.
• One primary data center is housed in one of the two buildings that comprise our headquarters in Columbus, GA.  Data from this primary center is mirrored to network storage in our second building, as well as to a separate Class III/IV commercial co-location facility more than 90 miles outside of Columbus, providing continuous data and server replication.  This off-site data center is one of the largest commercial data centers in the world, and is a 100% green facility. Should a natural disaster or technical outage strike our Columbus, GA site, our other data center has been built and tested to serve as our primary recovery node.
• All sites have redundant internet service providers, battery and generator-powered backup power.
• All sites have physical and software security measures, such as an alarmed perimeter, controlled access and video monitoring, in place.
• Our data centers have alarm monitoring services in place to detect temperature and humidity changes to prevent equipment failure.
• Operations may be run out of one center independently or from multiple centers concurrently, as needed.
• Data is replicated and backed-up every 15 minutes.
• OmegaFi maintains our corporate data and client data in the same environment, so we are highly motivated to reach our uptime goals. If our clients can’t access their data, we can’t access ours.
• Each location is a virtualized environment utilizing shared storage with multiple paths to the server cluster. In the event of a hardware failure on one server, the load simply switches automatically to another. These multiple redundancies mean the environment is much less susceptible to hardware failure, and additional storage capacity can easily be added to meet future growth needs.

OmegaFi’s SaaS model reduces for our clients the expense associated with building, updating and maintaining a sophisticated technological infrastructure, both hardware and software, and provides automated data redundancy in multiple, secure and physically distinct locations. While we recognize that many types of events could disrupt normal business operations, our business continuity plans are designed to provide optimum availability of business-critical data for both our clients and our employees.