Business Continuance and Disaster Recovery

Business Continuance and Disaster Recovery

Business continuance and disaster recovery planning are becoming commonplace in today's enterprise, driven particularly by both compliance (as mentioned in the previous section) and the overarching threats presented by malicious attackers (inside and outside), natural disaster, and terrorist attacks. While business continuance and disaster recovery are two mutually exclusive and adjacent business initiatives, they are often coupled together to provide a more holistic approach to ensuring that businesses can survive in the presence of a disastrous scenario through articulate contingency planning, effective system recovery processes, service failover, and routing of application traffic and workload. Business continuance and disaster recovery are defined as follows:

• Business continuance: The ability of a business to continue operations in the event of a disaster. This requires that systems be readily available, in an active (hot site), standby (warm site), or offline (cold site) mode to assume responsibility when primary systems are rendered unavailable.

• Disaster recovery: The ability of a business to recover business-critical data, applications, and services after a disastrous event has taken place.

Both of these initiatives rely not only on well-documented and tested processes, but also on the availability of data, infrastructure, and personnel to run business-critical applications. To ensure that data and infrastructure are readily available, many organizations have deployed secondary (or tertiary) data centers that have facilities and hardware necessary to resume operation. Data can be replicated from the primary data center(s) to the secondary or tertiary data center(s) via synchronous or asynchronous methods to ensure different levels of recoverability and continuity.

With a consolidated server infrastructure, organizations are better positioned to implement more effective business continuance and disaster recovery solutions. Less server infrastructure is required and fewer silos of data must be replicated to distant data centers. Accelerators can even be deployed to improve the throughput and efficiency of replication by minimizing bandwidth consumption, enabling better utilization of available network capacity, and ensuring that the replicated data in the secondary site is more coherent to the data stored in the primary site.