Well-planned business continuity and disaster recovery solutions are critical to organisations operating in 24/7 environments. Minimal to zero disruption is the goal of today’s enterprises when faced with planned or unplanned outages.
At the heart of this issue is data. Data is an irreplaceable corporate asset. Replacement copies of vital corporate records are not available on the open market. Without a copy of the data, loss will be irreversible and permanent. Data stored on many systems is viewed as a strategic asset, and as the value of the data increases, the reliability and quality of storage solutions must be considered. There is no question that storage is the primary technical component of all business continuity solutions.
Example of Archiving Data for Preservation and Review
Enterprises can now build business continuity plans based on the value of their data, with cost of data protection (from offsite tape backup to remote disk copy with extended server clustering) tied directly to the value and/or the accessibility requirements of the data itself.
Business Continuity, Not Just Disaster Recovery
Traditional disaster recovery addresses long-term, catastrophic events and may seem to be a costly and disruptive solution to an unlikely occurrence. This view is changing rapidly as it becomes apparent that in reality, the same protections can eliminate the short-term disruptions that have significant and continual negative economic impact on business operations. The accumulation and frequency of these limited disruptions is such that their aggregate cost outweighs the extremely rare event (and cost) of the destruction of IT facilities. Most organisations are reluctant to make large investments for uncertain and rare events. To many it appears as if there are no tangible benefits for disaster recovery. They think it is expense that brings only peace-of-mind, and investments for peace-of-mind lose out to those investments that have a positive business benefit.
Disaster recovery planning is focused around the 'smoking crater'. Invoking a disaster recovery plan can take longer than the vast majority of real disruptions an organisation experiences, such as system failures, software defects, power failures, equipment breakdowns, hacker attacks, and operator errors. The disaster recovery plan can be ineffective for these more familiar problems. Even planned downtime for maintenance takes precious time away from valuable business functions. These short-term disruptions are far more common and, given the 24/7, global operating mode, can be very costly even though they cause relatively short-term outages. As a matter of fact, persistent short-term failures can be extremely detrimental to a business.
By implementing a robust IT infrastructure that supports business continuity, the CFO will see a payoff as often as several times a year through more rapid recovery than, for example, tape backup. Every organisation needs to be able to recover from a disaster if it occurs, but the only irreplaceable element is the data. Consequently, it may make sense to copy data to tape daily as the ultimate offsite backup, but the important requirement is to keep the business running with data replication in the face of the far more frequent but less disastrous events.
More Information?
Call Global Storage on 03 9445 3300 and ask for one of our consultants to understand more about Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery Solutions suitable for your organisations.
