What is Business Continuity?
What is Business Continuity?
In today’s business world, “Business Continuity” can mean almost anything that allows a business to keep functioning. Some small businesses may only consider trivial items as critical to ensuring their business runs smoothly, such as making sure their printer ink & toner, pens and paper are always there when needed. But what happens if the printer does work at all, or your email server crashes? What will you do if there is a fire in your building, or the power is down for days? What about virus outbreaks like SARS, or flooding, hurricanes, or other natural disasters? Even bomb threats and terrorist strikes… All of these events have happened in the US is recent years, and no country, city or building is immune from unexpected disasters.
As it becomes more critical to maintain business uptime in today’s 24/7, hyper competitive business climate it’s important to understand all the elements of a proper business continuity plan.
People
If your employees can’t gain access to your office do you have a backup plan, and more importantly have you tested the plan? At the very least, the critical employees needed to run the bare essentials of your business, such as accounting, sales and marketing should be able to work from home. For larger enterprises it’s common for a separate building to be setup and ready to go at a moment’s notice. Although this is expensive, there are also options to use shared office space dedicated to disasters, or even have office spaces trucked in on cube containers. For most companies a work from home scenario will be the most cost effective solution. Now it’s just a matter of ensuring your IT infrastructure is capable of allowing adequate access to your critical IT systems to keep your business running.Plan
Start with the end goal in mind, and come up with a plan. Ask yourself, what will happen if everything is destroyed, all your paper records, all your servers, desktops, your internet connection (or router) is down, etc? Once you have determined an acceptable level of risk, i.e. what you can function without, start working towards a solution. Where costs are highly constrained improvise, the owner of the companies basement could double as a DR site if a datacenter is too costly. Technologies such as offsite data replication is so affordable today using vendors such as StarWind Software’s iSCSI SAN or NetGear that the small costs associated with disaster prevention are well worth it.Applications
Ultimately your data is worthless without applications to manipulate and make sense of the data. So don’t assume that protecting your data will allow you to function in a pain free DR environment. Applications can all be protected by setting up redundant servers at a DR site. With server virtualization, and even desktop virtualization, you can easily and affordably maintain a redundant IT infrastructure. The DR site doesn’t need to be an identical copy of your main site. Since the DR site will typically only be used by a limited number of employees under a disaster scenario, and only for what may be a few hours to weeks you can get away will scaling down the DR site, i.e. by using lower performing servers, even going so far as using only single power supplies on servers and even using less RAM.Data
Protecting your data with an iSCSI SAN such as from StarWind Software, HP, IBM or EMC will allow you to leverage low cost data replication over Ethernet. For failures within a site, such as data corruption, you can leverage SAN snapshots, local replication and backup to disk to ensure you are able to restore individual files, folders or full volumes in a fraction of the time it takes to find a backup tape, restore from tape, and hope the tape isn’t corrupt. Replicating data to a remote DR site will allow you to recover data and/or connect users to servers and applications running at the DR site with little to zero data loss.Network & Hardware
Other elements of the IT infrastructure to consider include your network, both the LAN, SAN and WAN and internet. Implementing multi-homed internet services allows you to have more than one ISP provide service to your location, protecting you from a single vendor from losing service. When architecting your SAN, ensure you use two Ethernet switches for dedicated storage traffic to provide redundancy at the switch layer. It’s also a good idea to make sure all your critical servers have dual power supplies, and optionally, for each power supply to be plugged into a separate UPS, also protecting you in the case of UPS failure.SAN’s such as StarWind Software’s iSCSI SAN allow you to protect your storage resources with dual storage nodes for HA (High Availability), and leverage features of VMware such as vMotion (called Live Migrate in Hyper-V), so you can easily architect a business continuity and disaster recovery plan whether you experience something as simple as a server failure, or your entire office is incapacitated.
The number of businesses that can financially survive critical disasters without a well thought out plan is statistically very low. And human nature is such that people tend not to want to purchase insurance unless it’s required by law or is extremely low cost. The good news is that technology has advanced rapidly for DR over the last 5 years and costs have drastically dropped even just in the past 2-3 years. There are many ways to solve your business continuity challenges allowing you to meet price points from as low as a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars for enterprise scale operations.
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