Combining business continuity and disaster recovery with disaster preparedness automation technology

Summary of this article: How do I keep running when my data center stops or the building is damaged? Such a topic is unpleasant, and related questions are more difficult to answer. Equally annoying is how to assess the actual overall cost of current weak or ineffective data protection scenarios. Through the introduction of automation technology, enterprises can effectively solve the two problems mentioned above, for BCDR good planning.

The industry seems to have been confusing the differences between business continuity (BC) and disaster Recovery (DR) processes. Companies often use one of the terms to refer to another described action. Many businesses are deficient in either or both of these areas, leading to disastrous results. No one wants a disaster, no business is willing to face the problem: How to keep your data center running or building damaged? Such a topic is unpleasant, and related questions are more difficult to answer. Equally annoying is how to assess the actual overall cost of current weak or ineffective data protection scenarios. Through the introduction of automation technology, enterprises can effectively solve the two problems mentioned above, for BCDR good planning.

Let's start with the definitions of BC, Dr, and often misunderstood terms.

Business Continuity (BC) is the ability of an organization to maintain operations as a result of a system failure, human error, or other unforeseen cause of damage that is large or small. The comprehensive BC program includes a complete portfolio of resources and logistics spanning infrastructure, execution processes, supply chain logistics, and staffing. In it, BC is a standby or auxiliary system that ensures that critical business services are switched to various facilities in the data center in the event of a primary system failure.

Disaster recovery (DR) refers to replicating IT resources to remote sites where it business services can continue to run when a disaster in the primary data center causes the core system or the entire physical facility to be deactivated. The fully mature Dr system can not only fail over to the remote site where the business can continue to run, but also the complete IT service can be failback to the main site after the failure, as long as most of the "disaster" is short-term, not devastating.

Clearly, there are many intersections between BC and Dr, which complement each other in protecting critical datacenter functionality, and also challenge effective deployment and test walkthroughs. When it people want to protect business transactions and corporate revenues through technology and program planning, they face two major hurdles.

BCDR Planning Hurdles: Complexity

The implementation of the BCDR plan may be subversive. The number of it elements involved is so large that it is almost impossible to manage the entire process. In addition, programs for failover and recovery of all these elements must be tested regularly. Many data centers have insufficient test walkthroughs and even no such test walkthroughs. A recent survey of CIOs has shown that awareness of test drills is progressing, but the frequency of test drills has not increased, and 54% per cent of respondents indicated that such tests would take about two times a year (see Survey briefs). This frequency remains relatively low, and only 41% per cent of respondents successfully recovered all applications in a few of the test walkthroughs they performed.

The real risk, however, is that these respondents may think they are prepared for the disaster because they do the planning and occasionally carry out relevant testing exercises. Time is everything in the recovery process. The faster you recover, the more money you will save (in other words, the less financial loss). BCDR scheduled test walkthroughs are critical to improving recovery time and ensuring process readiness.

In fact, the complexity of the actual failover and recovery of the test walkthrough is decreasing, thanks in part to the widely adopted virtualization technology. As servers, desktops, and storage are virtualized, the ability to achieve complete mobility of systems and data across distances is enhanced. Most enterprises adopt virtualization technologies for integration and flexibility, and this flexibility extends to crisis times. Human mobility can be easily addressed through desktop virtualization, which enables companies to maintain full productivity through offsite operations when corporate facilities are inaccessible.

Another step in reducing the complexity of BCDR is through automation. Disaster recovery Automation automates the failover and failback processes of the primary site IT operations. Automation tools also cover all data center operations, managing the entire business application services, such as ERP and CRM, as a single protection and recovery unit. The most effective automated solutions can even be mapped to operational patterns, allowing it employees to define dependencies between the different systems and components of any given business. This is significant for shortening recovery times and ensuring successful failover or failback operations. Automated BCDR tools can also provide test walkthroughs that have no impact on business operations, so that organizations can perform more frequent test drills to better prepare for disasters.

BCDR Planning hurdles: Cost

Before companies consider the cost of BCDR, they must first consider the cost of an unplanned outage. ESG's recent findings suggest that most businesses find that even a bit of downtime can be costly. In the ESG survey, 74% per cent of respondents indicated that they could tolerate up to three hours of downtime before starting to suffer from revenue losses, and 53% indicated that they could not afford to stop even one hour. Yes, bcdr costs are important, but one has to take into account that business processes are more reliant on it, and that a lack of bcdr planning can be costly when a disaster occurs.

Concerns about costs have kept some companies locked in the old Dr strategy, although they are no longer valid. For example, tape recovery takes several hours or days to complete. The time cost of recovering a data center partially or completely from tape is enormous, although virtual tape libraries (VTL) and other disk-based de-duplication solutions accelerate the backup and recovery process, data recovery operations performed with traditional backup software remain complex and lengthy, far exceeding the tolerable levels of most businesses.

Local recovery is often the most economical option for data loss caused by human error or technical failure, which basically accounts for 84% of failures and data loss scenarios. Remote recovery is still the best solution for an uncontrollable disaster caused by natural disasters. When an enterprise data center is affected by a wide range of disasters, its IT team must consider the level of importance of the services provided.

Not all data services are equally important, so you have to figure out which services are critical first-level services, which are secondary services, and what different service-level agreements (SLAs) These applications are associated with. A service rating based on SLAs ensures optimal uptime for all business-critical applications while at the same time making the most effective investments in BCDR resources.

Enterprise control costs can also reduce the reliance on tape through new technologies such as snapshots and uninterrupted data protection. These technologies can significantly improve recovery time, eliminate backup windows, and reduce tape activity from daily backups to monthly backups, reducing the operational costs of backup and recovery operations. In addition, businesses can reduce the cost of data replication by eliminating physical data transport through a WAN-optimized replication solution.

Automated bcdr reduce cost and complexity

The problems involved in the BCDR plan could be daunting. Do we have a proper test walkthrough? Are we ready for small and major disasters? How long does it take to recover? How much loss does downtime bring to the business? It is easy to answer these questions when the enterprise can take full advantage of the automation technology for failover and failback, ensuring enterprise revenue and allowing business applications to continue to run essentially without impact.

(Responsible editor: admin)