360°IT Blog

It amazes me organisations are still suffering longer than necessary interruptions to the availability of business-critical systems - not because they have an inadequate backup infrastructure, but because they failed to consider the process of recovery when designing and implementing their data protection strategy. Only when they have a failure do they realise the true impact their backup system has on the organisation's ability to generate revenue or provide a service.

For many years, the data protection infrastructure focused on the speed of backup - how quickly and with how little impact could an organisation generate a copy of the data? Could it get that copy away from the source, and keep it for the "required" length of time? The focus was on "can we recover" our business in the event of a failure, rather than "how quickly can we recover" our business.

In today's world, more applications are critical to a company's success and any lack of availability is visible not just to employees, but increasingly to customers. Online services may generate revenue or provide an essential line of communication to the customer base, and an outage not only affects your bank balance but can also damage your reputation, from which it is much harder to recover.

As with all things IT, there are many ways to increase the availability of the application. A lot are focused on physical failure of the systems, fewer on the logical corruption of the data, and very few indeed on all-round protection. Some will be relevant to an organisation, others physically unsuited to its environment.

The speed of recovery should be the starting point for any organisation planning or re-evaluating their disaster recovery needs. And for others it might be a reason to start rethinking those plans, since many companies are still relying on procedures deployed when their data was smaller and their systems not so visible.

So with the end of the summer holidays approaching fast, perhaps now is the time to get back to school and learn about the latest technologies for increasing the availability of your company's systems

Andrew Brewerton is a senior director for business development at CA Technologies.

Tags:

backup, back-up, availability, DR, disaster recovery, speed of recovery, reducing downtime, business continuity, BCP

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