Business Continuity Disaster Recovery’s Continuously Evolving Terrain
The surge in the number of business disruptions in recent years and their impact on commercial objectives has obliged enterprises to prioritize their resiliency objectives. The mission criticality of tier 1 applications means that organizations cannot afford even negligible down times.
C level focus areas and stakeholder concerns have been relishing greater visibility for obvious reasons. When the company’s stock prices, bottom line or sales targets take a hit, the repercussions can be manifold. And then a response has to be leveraged within the bounds of compliance and this makes the scenario all the more complicated.
Industry wise Research Findings
Manufacturing
- C-Level Control – Corporations just can’t afford to compromise on their replication and disaster recovery objectives. Even a minor data corruption incident in a financial management database can severely impact operations
Insurance
- Mitigating Risks – A business as usual status needs to be restored within twenty four hours to avoid defaulting on compliance Financial Services
Financial Services
- Downtime
- Regulatory norms mandated by SEC mean that IT enabled stock trading needs to be operational ALL THE TIME. Even a thirty minute downtime could result in business closure for the firm’s undertakings
- Daily transactions collectively amount trillions of dollars. In such a scenario, a downtime window of twenty to thirty minutes is just unthinkable. Even a fifteen second outage translates to losses in the range of billions of dollars
Consumer Sector
- Financial Implications – In the case of consumables such as food , a 24 hour ERP system downtime amounts to around half a million dollars in losses. Revenues are severely affected even when business processes are stalled for an hour. Operations need to be restored in less than ten minutes
Hospitality
- Unforeseen Incidents – There have been cases when the power supply was interrupted both at the main and backup facility, resulting in days of business inactivity
Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery – Practicalities & Constraints
The various processes that are deployed during a crisis collectively comprise an organization’s resiliency capability. The execution of these procedures span over extended timeframes and have its demands in terms of assets, resources and infrastructure. The ground realities of implementing plans – bringing together skilled resources, the right technology, equipment and other factors in the right combination – can be a daunting task. Commonly encountered constraints include:
Expenditure – Making an Organization’s business model robust and resilient costs money and involves some serious spending on hardware, connectivity, backup locations and more.
Varying SLA Clauses – Systems and applications are built with different technologies and vary in terms of features, functionalities and mission criticality. This means that the production and quality metrics based on which the service rendered is assessed will vary from system to system.
Data Volume – Year on year, the data storage needs of corporations increases by more then half. This puts a huge workload on existing LAN and WAN infrastructures.
Connectivity – Upgrading network infrastructure – reducing latency, increasing bandwidth and so on – provides a return on investment over time. However, these financial numbers are not always in sync with the annual surges in data volume.
Infrastructure – Business Operations can be disrupted due to outages in utilities such a power and cooling or other services such as telecommunications.
Project Management – Converting business needs into IT systems takes time. Besides, it is not always easy to accurately assess the impact of system failures and malfunctions on an organization’s commercial targets.
Testing – Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Capabilities need to be tested and updated frequently because any disruption is erratic by nature. And the variables that influence the manner in which an operational hazard evolves can never be accurately forecasted. Nevertheless, the previous six factors mentioned often impede testing efforts.
IT Complexity – Virtualized systems and cloud based solutions can give rise to a number of complications such as:
- Connectivity disruptions between virtual machines and hosts
- Too many virtual machines beyond the network’s capabilities
- Leveraging Recovery at the image and system level
N-tier Application – In the case of tools such as SharePoint, recovery solutions have to be standardized across multiple tiers.
Recovery Scope – IT systems are an amalgamation of various components and segments such as networks, processing capabilities, services, platforms and information. Resiliency solutions must be comprehensive and span across all these components.
BCDR Best Pratice Recommendations
BCDR processes have evolved over the years through a continuous cycle of trial and error. Many enterprises have invested in robust resiliency capabilities based on the following strategies:
Hiring Professionals – Mapping business resiliency to IT systems through a BCDR solution is serious business. Organizations cannot overlook the importance of recruiting trained professionals with the relevant skills and expertise in the field.
Prioritization – List out tier applications based on mission criticality and then draft SLAs for each tier accordingly. The monetary impact of downtime for each tier and application must also be taken into consideration.
Redundant infrastructural capabilities – Enterprises must back their operational requirements with multiple options for connectivity and utility services such as power, fuel, water, cooling and so on.
Testing – Businesses review existing capabilities on a regular basis, at least once every three months. The test findings must include detailed results and vulnerability patching assessments.
Goals & Targets – Companies set goals and targets based on which the Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery model can be evaluated annually across a wide array of production and quality metrics. The assessment exercise must be in line with the SLA terms for different application tiers.
Tools – Firms also use tools to spot system vulnerabilities such as orphaned virtual servers.
Network optimization – Traffic congestion, large data volumes, latency and similar concerns can be countered through data de-duplication techniques.
Cloud based solutions – Many companies also exploit the multiple benefits that can be leveraged through a public, private or hybrid cloud service, such as:
- Accelerated System Restoration
- Highly Secured IT Environment
- Cost Efficiency
- Reduced Manual Intervention through Automation
- Zero Touch Deployment
- Adaptability
- Scalability
Forecasting – Many organizations proactively chalk out a BCDR improvement roadmap and plan for the future in a bid to stay current and up to date in a fast paced and constantly evolving business ecosystem.
Designing a Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery Strategy
The ideal choice for a BCDR product should facilitate a comprehensive solution that enhances performance across connectivity, application and storage needs. Through a combination of WAN Optimization and cloud based storage, enterprises can avert numerous hazards that impede information sharing across networks and storing data on the cloud. This makes it easier to seamlessly transition high intensity business disruptions.
Organizations should be able to easily incorporate the BCDR solution into their existing IT environment without having to make structural changes in their infrastructure. This also allows organizations the flexibility to experiment with different possibilities. For instance, the BCDR solution can combine local branch data backup, private cloud consolidation and public cloud service options. IT teams must also be able to scale WAN capabilities for better BCDR performance through cost efficiency and high availability.
Data volume – Activities such as backup and replication consume huge volumes of data. Enterprises can minimize packet transmission requirements through data de-duplication techniques.
Prioritization – Mission critical applications are given preference over auxiliary services. This reduces the load on the network’s bandwidth while simultaneously increasing security through more frequent and faster data replication and backup.
Visibility – Enterprises can make informed decisions when they can analyze traffic flowing across the entire network with a granular level of control. The root cause of flaws, glitches, structural inefficiencies and other vulnerabilities can be spotted and rectified within short time frames.
Storing Data on the Cloud
Through a combination of public, private and hybrid cloud solutions, organizations can move applications to a virtual platform, enhance output as well as increase employee productivity. Company expenditure can be stabilized through WAN Optimization that increases performance efficiency. Accessing, transferring and migrating data can also be achieved quickly and with ease. Other benefits include:
- Faster virtual machine migration across private and public cloud environments
- Bringing down bandwidth requirements for branch office and data center traffic that are heavy on data volume
- Overcoming WAN performance glitches and facilitating effective cloud service usage
- Incorporating WAN optimization technologies into software, virtual machines and hardware devices
- Minimizing expenses by moving backup and archival tasks to a cloud based platform
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