Business Continuity
When disaster strikes, don't be left stranded. Get your system backup and running quickly with a business continuity plan
According to Microsoft, business continuity is “The ability of an organization to continue to function even after a disastrous event, accomplished through the deployment of redundant hardware and software, the use of fault tolerant systems, as well as a solid backup and recovery strategy.”The question that has continuously been asked recently is, can tape backups provide the reliability and data integrity that is needed for a 100% trustworthy business continuity solution? The answer is, unfortunately no. Many businesses find that due to the manual processes associated with tape backups, employees either forget or simply don’t bother to carry out the backup process, resulting in missing days or weeks of backup. However with online backup business continuity plans, data is backed up continuously. CDP (continuous data protection) runs around the clock, backing up the data as it is saved, ensuring that the latest version of the document, database or mailbox is protected and restorable.
The main difference between disaster recovery and business continuity, is the idea that hardware is not just provisioned, but is actually on standby, so an exact replica of your I.T. environment is waiting for you to switch over to should your systems go down. Techniques such as server replication, virtual environments, local storage recoveries and powerful data centre hardware all add to a company’s ability to provide a high level of business continuity.
By already having standby systems in place, the amount of downtime a company as to experience is around an hour, and not 1 or 2 days, while replacement hardware is ordered to site, or tapes are retrieved from the warehouse in which their being stored. This reduction in downtime can equal savings to the customers, especially for ecommerce web servers, exchange email servers or mission critical application servers.
For any company that can’t afford the loss of data, a business continuity strategy is an absolute must, and really should not be compromised by using 2nd class, cheaper solutions who may claim they can deliver the moon, when in reality they do not have the behind the scenes infrastructures to do so.
Decide if you can afford Server Downtime
You need to think carefully about if you can afford to have servers inacessable for even a few hours. For example, if your e-shop retail server was to crash, in the middle of the day, what would the cost to the business be.
Try: You should take stock of the computer systems that you have in place. Decide which servers and systems your business cannot afford to lose for even half an hour.
Having a complete business continuity plan in place would allow the company to switch almost immediatelyover to their identical I.T. enviroment, be it in a virtual enviroment or a physical one.
Make a desicion on Vitual Servers
Consider the option of replacing your servers boxes with a virtual enviorment encompasing your entire I.T. infrastructure, as this could save you money in the event of a disaster by taking advantage of all the benfits of vitual computing.
Try: Investigate the pro's and cons of the computer virtualisation, as not having to provision the replacment hardware can save you money during your business continuity plan.
Invoke a Plan
A business continutiy plan MUST be thought out methodically, with the smallest of details being taken into consideration.
Try: Sit down meetings with heads of depatments, detail all the things they NEED to access in order for their department to operate, for example: -
- Phone lines
- Internet
- Email Access
- Internal Software Access
- Printers
- Know exactly what you need to protect
- Have a clear plan of what needs to be done in the event of a disaster
- Test run the plan on a regular basis
- Check backups and disaster reocvery procedures regularly for data integrity
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