To cope up with today’s fierce business competition; organizations have to pay attention to keep the pace of their business continuity. Author in this article has sketched guidelines for organization to achieve business continuity at best.
Have you lost sleep over a nightmare of losing a priced belonging? Recollection makes you gasp in horror and instantly check on its safety. For businesses, data is their gold. An entangled IT wire is a short circuit capable of halting all business operations. The most dreaded dream of any CEO. With calamity frequenting our doorstep, either as natural disasters or acts of terror, this nightmare is now reality businesses have to live with. The competitive business environment — a 24/7 world of just-in-time delivery, global supply chains, round-the-clock customer demand, and competition being a mouse click away — leaves business with little or no recoup time. Instantaneous restart is expected. Disaster recovery or business continuity plans is the instant cure pill for such victims.
Business continuity solutions allow operations to resume fast from the point of wreckage with the most current data available. Such solutions help your company operate non-stop, building a resilient enterprise. Not only does it save huge bucks as data is business these days but also spares you of raised eyebrows about the calamity’s impact on the company’s valuation. It offers software that minimises labour-intensive nature of backup and recovery procedures providing productivity benefits. One can use remote data sites for productive, non-critical tasks like application testing, data mining, decision support, and trend analysis. It lets the company reap the benefits of standardised IT practices on fewer platforms by consolidating resources.
Technologies range from enhancing backup through local mirroring (to eliminate the backup window and lessen the backup’s impact on server performance) to solutions that transmit backup data to an offsite tape-vaulting facility. In other words, it provides a complete solution allowing non-disruptive backup; eliminating single points of failure; and providing automation for business continuity procedures to ease the process of replication and backup and to speed data restoration when such a task is required.
Get every step right
For a fool-proof business continuity plan, a step-by-step procedure should be followed. One must begin with assessment of the potential risks and their probability for your enterprise. Business Impact Analysis (BIA) helps you determine which applications require most protection based on value of the data, business impact of down-time and cost. It helps you zero in on recovery-time objective (RTO), i.e the time period for which you can let your systems be down, and the recovery-point objective (RPO), i.e. the amount of data you can afford to lose.
Thereafter, chart your master plan to meet your RTO and RPO needs. The company should remember there is no one quick-fix solution that fits every application. For instance, a stock trading company may decide to pay for completely redundant IT systems that would allow it to immediately start processing trades at another location. A manufacturing company, however, may decide to wait 24 hours to resume shipping. The increasing value of data has caused more and more businesses to turn to remote, disk-based data replication to ensure that their organisations can pick up operations rapidly and with minimal data loss and corruption in the event of a wide area disaster.
Companies have a number of options for replicating data that fall into two categories: synchronous or asynchronous replication. Synchronous replication ensures that a remote copy of the data identical to the primary copy is created at the same time the primary copy is updated. While it ensures speedy data recovery, it has distance limitations. Asynchronous replication, on the other hand, provides a way to mirror sites across any distance, and usually involves IP networks. With asynchronous replication, the primary write operation is disconnected from the remote write operation. The application writes the data to primary storage and continues with the next operation. Unlike synchronous replication, it can span any distance without impact from propagation delay.
How do you decide? If the business cannot tolerate any data loss and operations must be resumed quickly, then synchronous replication is their answer. An organisation that can tolerate being down until it can reconstruct the last few transactions, or that cannot tolerate the performance impact of synchronous propagation delays, might want to opt for a less costly asynchronous solution. A third option is a three data center (3DC) model. It provides the best combination of protection against disaster with minimal data loss and downtime.
After the solutions are identified and implemented, practice drills should be conducted periodically. This allows problems uncovered during these drills to be addressed and procedures designed to deal with potential deficiencies also get tested to determine its effectiveness.
Roll back a rolling disaster
Some disasters or calamities, called rolling disasters, don’t have all systems, storage, or network connections collapse together at the same moment. Each component fails independently resulting in corrupted and unusable data that often requires difficult and very lengthy recovery. New methods of marinating backups with minimal time lags (real-time or near-real time copy) have made rolling disasters a bigger concern. Unless the real-time or near-real-time backup system is designed to handle rolling disasters, the backup can be corrupted as well. Asynchronous replication falls flat in such a situation because of inconsistency between the primary site and the remote site.
Real-time and near-real-time products help companies recover from rolling disasters. These products time stamp all writes to the remote copy, allowing the system to recreate the sequence of writes.
A word of caution
However, one must remember every company’s needs are different so can’t have one prescribed drug. You can go wrong. Inadequate planning is the biggest reason for flop business continuity plans. Everyone thinks they know what they have on their networks but most don’t really know how many servers they have, or how they’re configured, or what applications reside on them-what services are running, what version of software or operating systems they are using. Asset management tools claim to do the trick but can fail to capture important details about software revisions etc. All this leads to failure in addressing the gaps in your recovery model and failure in bringing the business into the planning and testing of recovery efforts.
Nevertheless, recovery preparedness solutions is like a must insurance policy every business requires to take their business to the next level by providing secondary access to data without impacting regular production.
-By: Srikant Chakrapani, Director, Enterprise Solutions, Hitachi Data Systems |
