Business Continuity
Business Continuity focuses on continuance of business processes and related tasks in the event of system outage(s). As companies centralize more and more the management of systems in the IT infrastructure to reduce operational costs, systems and data availability is central to assuring the continuance of business no matter what degree of disaster has occurred. Accurate mapping and accounting for all Interdependencies of data and applications is critical to business continuance.
The key to both is proper planning and strategy deployment. Best Practice strategies include redundancy of power and systems, mirrored storage/data, properly designed and deployed backup strategy, and documented processes and procedures.
The view of the IT infrastructure at a glance is contained and simplistic but in reality is complex in its ability to exchange, transfer and store data, process bits and bytes, move data across a heterogeneous environment through hubs, switches and ultimately be accessible to the end-user. Akin to the Rubik’s cube, a change in the environment affects other components within that environment. With this visual in mind, taking a global view to understand the effects of actions is critical in effectively architecting and managing the environment.
Data and application interdependencies are a common Achilles heal when designing high availability, Data Protection, Disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Most technology groups fail to understand the relationships of data and applications across the enterprise and thus become a major point of failure to any plan.
