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Busines Continuity

  • Business Continuity (BC)

Business Continuity (BC), Disaster Recovery (DR) and Backup and Restore planning are fundamental to the well-being of an organization it is intended to ensure continuity in the face of unforeseen or difficult circumstances. A Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery plan is essential to protect the well-being of any organization, although this cannot really be over-emphasized, so many organizations still wait for a disaster to happen before putting together a plan or have plans which are out of date.

IT Disasters can be classified into three distinct categories;

  • Natural Disaster: - these disasters include flood, fire, earthquake, hurricane, etc.
  • System Disasters: - these disasters include hardware faults, software faults, virus, power fluctuations, etc.
  • Man Made Disasters: - these disasters include negligence, lack of trained personnel, accidents, walkouts, sabotage, burglary, intrusion, etc.

It is estimated that most large companies spend between 2% and 4% of their IT budget on disaster recovery planning, with the aim of avoiding larger losses in the event that the business cannot continue to function properly due to loss of IT infrastructure and/or data. Of the companies that had a major loss of business data, 43% never reopen, 51% close within two years, and only 6% will survive long-term.

With the increasing importance of information technology for the continuation of business critical functions such as Financial systems, Email and ERP systems. Organisations can no longer leave their DR strategy on the backburner.

Disaster Recovery Techniques

  • Alternate server Recovery

  • Warm Server Disaster Recovery

    Hot standby servers technique focuses on being able recover and reconfigure servers at a remote site as quickly as possible if any server on the primary site fails.
  • Warm Server Disaster Recovery

In this system, some servers are at the alternate location and have operating systems and applications loaded, running and established network connections to the production network, ready to take over from a failed server at the primary site.

  • Cold Server Disaster Recovery

Cold server recovery is the most basic method, and involves staff, tapes, etc. moving to a recovery facility to begin the rebuilding process

  • Backup Software and Media

  • Single Server Backup Software

The most common backup solution employed by most small organisations are to use single tape devices that are ideally suited to backing a single server and it’s data.

  • Multi-Platform Backup Software

Any backup software in a multi-platform environment should support all the platforms in use, and all the applications whose data is being protected.

  • Backup Software with Integrated Disaster Recovery

An integrated disaster-recovery option is also worth considering, as it can help to quickly and efficiently rebuild a crashed system, though some RAID controllers do not support the use of disaster-recovery boot disks.

  • Backup Media

There are several backup media available on the market with each suiting differing backup solutions.

Server Availability

  • Server Resilience

Server resilience is normally described as the duplication of major components so the server can survive a failure of a component.

  • Server Replication

Server replication when a server’s data is replicated to a cold standby server, this can either be done with hardware that supports that protocol or using 3rd party software.

  • Server Virtualization (Cloud)

Server virtualization simply gives the ability to be able to present multiples operating systems on one server or one operating system could be presented on multiple servers thereby allowing for a single server to fail without failure to the system.