Continuous Availability means Assessing Risk to Deliver No Business Downtime
The reality in today’s global businesses is that downtime cannot be tolerated for vital applications.
The most critical applications include
Email platforms such as Exchange,
Mobile Platforms such as BlackBerry,
Collaboration Platforms such as SharePoint
and a myriad of applications that rely on SQLServer. Additionally,
IT professionals everywhere are implementing Virtualization for a variety of business
needs, most notably server consolidation and rapid system provisioning.
Traditional approaches the High Availability and Disaster Recovery have focused on protecting IT,
not on delivering business continuity. Clustering delivers High Availability at one level, but the
resources and skills required to implement a clustering solution mean the total cost of ownership
is beyond the reach of many budgets. And when Disaster strikes or whole server rooms have to be taken
down for planned maintenance the business is disrupted anyway.
Many firms still rely on legacy backup/recovery technologies in the belief that a Recovery Time Objective
(RTO) approaching zero delivers business availability. This approach is fundamentally flawed as the RTO
typically only applies to the data element, not to the application. The result is a scope of protection
that fundamentally misses the point, which is keeping the business running.
Newer technologies such continuous data protection and simple data replication have a role to play in
keeping data continuously available. For less critical applications these are good solutions, but consider
the operational profile of your business. Will the right IT skills be available, at the right time, to
recover the applications, reconnect them with the data and keep users running?
No business downtime means being proactive, not reactive. This means understanding the deployment requirements,
validating the hardware and software environment, monitoring to identify where failures may occur, and taking
action to prevent avoidable outages. This is where the ability to predict the success of the operation is a
precursor to protecting the business application in such a way that users continue to perform, because they
remain connected throughout the outage.
Assess your business risk and make sure you understand what continuous availability means for your business.
